Searching the Internet from Brandywine, Maryland

SEARCHING THE INTERNET

About Search Engines
Bad Sites
Reading the URL (Web Site Address)
Beware Pornography
Tips for Children - for parents and other caregivers

Search Engines: I conducted a thorough test of the most popular search engines with the aid of a site that lists the most popular ones at Search Engine Watch, which is a good site for learning about how search engines work. (Funny, they're not now listing one of my favorite search engines as one of the major ones!)

What I found from my test was that all of the search engines generally come up with different results. There are two search engines (below) that come up with the most results and yet there are some sites that are not duplicated between the two, so you must use them both to find all of the sites for a particular search you're doing - and even then it might miss some (those not yet linked or that block "robots"). Both of these search engines have advanced searches that will allow you to be more specific about what you are looking for. (The links below should pop up new windows so you won't lose this one.)

AllTheWeb.com

Google

Notice the differences between these sites. AllTheWeb.com has "Offensive content reduction is ON" as default, whereas Google has theirs set for OFF, but you can change them. I usually search with it "off" since they could block sites I want to see since many of them are NOT porn sites, for instance, any page with the word "gay" on it (more information about porn is below). The options are listed differently, so you'll need to consider different ways to do your searches in each. In Google, you can list several words in each of the categories: "with all of the words," "with the exact phrase," "with any of the words," and "without the words." In AllTheWeb.com, you can select either "all of the words," "any of the words," "exact phrase," and then also choose one word or phrase for three additional boxes which allow you to chose "should," "must," or "must not" include it and it could be in the "text," "title," "URL," or "Link to the URL." Both sites allow you to search by only a certain domain name, which is beneficial for sites that don't have search engines, or by just the high-level domain, such as ".gov" if you're only looking for sites from the government.

These search engines also allow you to search by other definitions, too. You can search by language, though if you use English words in your search, you will get primarily English words even if you don't search by language and specifying a language could eliminate sites that don't provide that specification in their code, so I suggest with most searches to leave it at "any language." You can also search by date, but this feature is not very useful on a lot of sites, such as this one, though it can be useful on sites that have numerous articles and archive several years of them, such as newspapers and magazines. AllTheWeb.com also allows searches on just news, pictures, videos, MP3 files (music), and FTP files (downloads). Lycos is also a good search engine for specialized searches.

When you find a web page that is very long, remember that you can search the page with the FIND option on your browser.

Beware of bad sites! There are lots of sites that claim to be directories for Brandywine and other resources that sound good, but they're really a lure for advertisements. You can read the URL (web site address - see below) which is usually shown in the search results, or sometimes you can tell by the description of the site, to determine if the site seems to have validity so as not to waste your time going there. Such sites might have domain names, like gotocity.com, globalindex.com, or hometownusa.com.

Reading URL's or Web Site Addresses: They all start with "http://", then some are followed by "www" though not necessarily - it doesn't really matter, so don't let that throw you. The "name.com" or "name.org" part of the URL is the domain name. Anyone can buy almost any domain name, except a few like ".edu" or ".gov". If you see ".edu" you can be fairly certain that it is an official institution of higher learning that is hosting the page, though it could be a student's page - most have rules about what students can post and many students put out good work. If you see ".gov" this is an official site of the federal government. Also, ".us" is for government sites as well, but for local governments. "md.us" would be for Maryland government sites.

Many companies purchase their own names for their domain name, so you may be able to tell the company by looking at the domain name, though some will choose an abbreviated version if their name is long. If it has a pretty popular name, some companies have taken others to court for using their name in their domain name, so site domain names, like "funkandwagnalls" is really for the encyclopedia. If you assume the name of a company, it sometimes will work, but not always. If you type in "coke.com" it will bring you to "coca-cola.com". Whereas "Dowlingwebdesign.com" will not bring you to Dowling Web Consulting & Training. If you just put that name in the browser location, though, most browsers these days allow you to use the location area for searches if the word doesn't have the upper domain, such as ".com" or ".org", in it for a complete web address, then you will find it at http://www.dowlingwebconsulting.com.

To determine other information about the specific page to which the link goes before clicking on it, you can look at additional information within the URL. If there is a longer domain name, for instance "company.site.com", the first name is a "subdomain" or directory within the main domain. An example of this would be "http://members.aol.com/svsvsv/default.htm" where "members" is the subdomain, so one could guess that this is an individual user's web page. After the domain name are additional directories, if you look at the URL in your browser now, you will see that you are at the domain "brandywinemd.com" in the "internetFAQ" directory on the "search" page. In a search, you might find this kind of URL: "http://www.placesnamed.com/b/r/brandywine.asp" which is apparently a site about place names and appears to be a large alphabetized directory. Since there is no "md" or "us", you could expect to find lots of different Brandywine listings there.

In a regular text search there are some other types of files you might find. Many search engines search PDF files, which end in .pdf, though Google will translate a PDF file into a web page if you click on their special link. Many browsers now will show a PDF file within the browser, though some do not. Text files which end in .txt can be viewed with browsers, though you will see the text displayed with whatever your default background settings are - usually white or gray.

Beware Pornography: In well over six years of searching, I've seldom come up with a porn site by accident. Usually it is obvious in the search description with terms, such as "XXX" or "adult". Most search engines also offer filtering of offensive words, which does eliminate most possible porn sites, though not all.

There are two incidents that I remember in the thousands of sites I've visited over the years. Both of these incidents were due to porn companies taking over other web sites. One was a link to technical information, which started popping up numerous windows with porn ads - ludicrous! I just clicked the windows closed as fast as I could and then reported the link to the site from which I started. The other incident was a report from a web site email list that a typical link had been taken over by a porn site, so I found it on one of my sites and immediately removed it. For people who own domain names, this should be a warning that you have to make sure not to let your domain-name subscriptions to expire.

Porn is not the only thing that concerns some parents about internet content. There are also web sites that contain graphic violence, adult satire, and instructions on making bombs. Though there are special child-friendly search engines, like Yahooligans, my rule-of-thumb is to think of the internet as the world. If your child is old enough to go into the world accompanied by you (parent or other caregiver), s/he is old enough to go on the internet accompanied by you. When your child is old enough to go out into the world alone, then s/he is old enough to go on the internet alone. Usually a child gets instructions for going out into the world, though, with limits and consequences for not following rules, so this could also be applied to the internet. If the child is not afraid to talk to you (usually when consequences aren't too strict or yelling or a typical response doesn't occur), then you should ask them about where they've been (what sites they visited) and who they've spoken to - not all strangers are bad - as a matter of fact, most aren't. Children should have a "handle" or "screen name" rather than using their real name, as do many adults, and never give out their street address or other personal information. For more information on protecting children on the internet, go to this site.: Internet Safety for Families Online

Also, try the Browse FAQ.

If you have trouble finding something on the internet and would like some help, feel free to email me, though I can't promise I'll be able to get right back to you or will be able to find it.

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