Web Searching

PAGE (7 of 10)

Search Example: Lycos

Lycos is an example of an indexed database engine search site. This example will walk you through an advanced search on LycosPro for HTML cascading style sheet information.

• Lycos Pro has two versions of searches available. The simple search available from the Lycos home page, (http://www.lycos.com/),  is integrated into their Web directory organization.  The other advanced search version, (http://lycospro.lycos.com/),  provides a natural language query mechanism, menus to designate the importance of matching the words, where in the document the terms should be located, and their proximity to one another. 
  
• Open a new browser window so that you can perform this example.
  
• Go to the Web site for Lycos Pro

  http://lycospro.lycos.com/

  

• Click on the Help link at the upper right of the window. This will take us to the Help Page which will describe how to use the advanced search features. Once you're finished reading the help documentation, click on your browser's BACK button to return to the search.

• Since we're using a boolean expression, we need to be sure to select All the words (any order) from the selection drop-down menu box at the top of the page in the Search for section..
  
• We're looking for cascading style sheets, (CSS), information, and since the term "cascading style sheets" is probably unique to the WWW, we may be able to conduct a search on just this term. However, the WWW has many sites dedicated to writing html documents which may mention CSS and we can filter some of these using the Lycos ranking features.

  So we'll enter into the search box, the term "cascading style sheets". The quotations could be used if we were looking for the exacting phrase, rather than separate words, but to start we will just use the terms without the quotes.

• Next, we want to select what aspect of the WWW we want to search. In the Search the... section select Entire document.
  
  We also want to just search for pages in English, so select English form the Select a Language ... section. 

• Lastly, We need to set the result rankings using the drop-fown menus near the bottom of the page in the Sort results by ranking... section. Choose the same settings as shown at the right to achieve similar results.

• We're ready to search, so click on the Go Get IT! button.

   

• Below is a partial listing of the first page of hits for this topic:

  

   

• Note: since new Web pages are being developed daily and indexed by the search engines your results may differ from this search. 
  
• You should now go back and try the different settings at the bottom of the panel to compare the differences between the search results. The next example will be using MetaCrawler.