Searching on the Internet may be the most fundamental online activity. There is so much out there, and it is changing so quickly, that searching is probably the only sane fallback position to have! In the last several posts (tools), I have been covering some of the basic tools for life online. Now we are getting into the things you can do online…
First…search…
There are a lot of search engines out there, for many specific things (check this link…), or the big guys (Google, Bing, Yahoo, et.al.), for everything. Using the tools I have already shown you (especially Firefox itself), there are a number of ways to find what you are looking for.
The latest version of Firefox has what is called its ‘awesome bar’ which allows you to search through your bookmarks and browsing history as you type in URL’s. This actually works better than you would imagine (for me that is…), but many out there are not as easily amused (do a search for “Firefox awesome bar reviews”).
After the ‘awesome bar’ there is also a regular search bar (to the right of the ‘awesome bar’). This is configurable to include many different search engines. You need to click on the little down arrow associated with the search engine in the window; this will bring you a pull down menu of the search engines on our installation of Firefox. If you want to include some others, just click on the “Manage Search Engines…” link at the bottom of this list. This action will bring you to a Mozilla Firefox web page that has lists of search engines (alphabetically listed). You can add tools like: Bing, EBay, Amazon.com, etc. It’s a big list…).
With these small customizations to your Firefox install, all you need now would be some deeper information about how to search ‘better’, or more efficiently. The online site Make Use Of has a great tutorial (in PDF form here, or online here) that covers a variety of search engines, and some basics in using these engines in a more sophisticated manner (Boolean operators, short cuts, and searching in an increasingly specific manner…). This is really worth downloading and looking over (I could think of worse things to print…). There are some other guides out there, here, here, and here.
Finally, there are some interesting things about personal taste. Some people like the bland, white screen on Google’s search engine, on the other extreme, some people really like the new, flashy Bing site (Microsoft’s search engine). They all have value, and are worth giving a chance to see if you like them. From an overview of some of the differences between these major search sites, you may find that there are many ‘value added’ search results. You can get images, videos, Twitter ‘tweets’, books, URL’s, shopping hints and maps from a simple search query.
This would seem to validate that there really is too much out there…
