Surfing the WebSearch EnginesThere are a number of search engines which will produce directories from your inquiry. I most frequently use Google, now used by AOL, Yahoo and Dogpile Dogpile actually uses a number of search engines. Google is a different type of search engine. It judges a site based on the number of other sites that link to it. This is good for some types of searches. Google is not the most used search engine. However, if you do not find what you want using it, try one of the other search engines. They search based on information on the web pages. When searching for something, you often get thousands of results (hits), most of which are not what you are looking for. You can focus in your search by using conditions. The easiest to use are either a "+" to require a conditions or a "-" to exclude conditions. For example when I searched for Whitehouse using Google, I had "about 528,000" hits. By going to +Whitehouse +Clinton (note no space after the + sign, but a space between Whitehouse and the +Clinton sign), I reduced the hits to 67,700. By going to Whitehouse +Clinton +Sex, I reduced the hits to 6,560. If you have a multi word item, such as "Tucson Medical Center", enclose it in quotes. This will force the search engine to look at the words as a phrase and not independently. If quotes are not used, it will return sites the contain either Tucson, Medical or Center. You can also use + and - with multi word searches. Often, when you get the results of your search you will see a lot of sights that refer to something that you are not interested in. You can eliminate then by using a - and a key work that represents them. There is usually a great deal of interest in health care related sites. I recommend Medline Plus and National Institutes of Health. They contain articles, references, etc. that have been reviewed. There are many other good sites related to hospitals and universities. Or go to your local hospital, TMC Health Care. However, be careful of commercial sites - those that end in .com. - unless they link to known hospitals. There are a lot of "medical sites" that are really just the modern version of the old snake oil salesperson. Two of my most frequently used sites are Maps Live and Map Quest that I use to find maps and driving directions. You can find maps, driving directions and estimated driving times. You can also always find the white and yellow pages for any US city. One of the easiest ways is to use Goggle. If you have a phone number and want the address that goes with it try Reverse Phone Directory. This site will give you the name and address of who has the phone number. It will also try to sell you some "Private Detective" services. |