Here are some tricks to find a web page I wrote a long time ago. They are good for newbies.

  1. The directions in Internet are usually easy to guess and you could say that the general definition is:

    http://www.(name of the company).(extention)

         The name of the company can be anyone. For example, try with Intel, Ibm, Apple, Pirelli, Virgin Interactive Entertainment (only the initials), Kodak, Sony, etc. Tha extension is usually com (comercial). Though there are some others: gov (government) or edu (educational). An example of a link to a site subsided by the government like the NASA would be:

    http://www.nasa.gov

         And a link to another page (which I recomend to all the manga fans) which is in a university would be:

    http://soyokaze.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~jei/anipike

         Of course if you want to go to the root directory of the university, you can write the direction until edu and voilá.


  2. Use a powerful searcher like Lycos or Yahoo. When you run them, they will allow you to make a search by words, by themes or both at the same time. You can look for "real" people too. They could sometimes run slowly, but they have in ther databases a very big number of registered Internet pages. Yahoo is smaller than Lycos. Keep that in mind.
  3. The more you specify your search, the better. Looks like nonsense but there's an example:

         Several days after I got my first access to Internet, a friend wanted me to look for information about the rol game "Warhammer". Whithout thinking it twice and willing to show him the usefullnes of Internet, I went to Lycos and wrote the word Warhammer in the search box.

         After some seconds, Lycos told me he found zillions of links to Warhammer (60,434,860 more precisely). After that, he showed me the first 20 links available.

         After choosing some of them, I realized that most of them were personal web pages of people who liked the game but didn't offer useful information about it apart from saying that the game is beautiful.

         Before giving up the search with the excuse of excess of garbage information, I had the idea to put more words in the search box. There's a magazine called White Dwarf who talks about warhammer so I wrote the three words: Warhammer Whithe Dwarf and the number of pages decreased sensibly. But they were still too much so I decided to put even more words in the search box and I also activated an option of Lycos (every good search engine has it) which tells him to show only the pages who contain all of the words specified in the search box.

         Result: I obtained a good number of possible links which resultet to be good and full of information.

  4. You can also reduce the number of found pages with the theme search. To demonstrate this, another example:

         Imagine you are fans of the Cranberries (popular music group) and want to search information about them. The easiest thing to to would be to put the word Cranberries in the search box of a search engine. Though, we would recieve a big number of links to pages related to them but with low quality or unuseful information (remember that if the creator of a web page writes somewhere that he likes the Cranberries, the search engine will show us that page even if the keyword appears only once).

         For that reason, every search engine offers us the theme search. In this case, we would click the option Entertainment and later on Music. After this, we write the name of the rock group, but before asking the program to start the search, we have to activate the option to look only in the pages about the theme Entertainment->Music.

         In this way, we will recieve better classified information. We could also tell the search engine to look for many words, like in the example of Warhammer, and then there would be no one to stop us this time :-).