From hungary-online-owner Thu Mar 7 06:25:44 1996 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id GAA01138 for hungary-online-announce-out31415; Thu, 7 Mar 1996 06:25:44 -0800 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id GAA01126; Thu, 7 Mar 1996 06:25:32 -0800 Received: from steve@isys.hu () via =-=-=-=-=-= for hungary-online-announce@hungary.yak.net (1113) Received: from kingzog.isys.hu (KingZog.iSYS.hu [194.24.160.4]) (fnord) by nando (8.6.5/8.6.5) with ESMTP id GAA01107 for ; Thu, 7 Mar 1996 06:24:47 -0800 Received: from [194.24.160.22] (bubba.iSYS.hu [194.24.160.22]) by kingzog.isys.hu (8.7.Beta.11/8.7.Beta.11) with SMTP id PAA07781; Thu, 7 Mar 1996 15:24:12 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: steve@mail.isys.hu Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 15:31:02 +0100 To: hungary-online-announce@hungary.yak.net From: steve@isys.hu (Steven Carlson) Subject: (HOL-A) HOL> how to find absolutely anything Sender: owner-Hungary-Online-announce@hungary.yak.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net ----------------------------- HUNGARY ONLINE a bimonthly column of links and reviews, as well as occasional commentary from Steven Carlson ----------------------------- Looking for something? Aren't we all. This week we'll learn how to find anything on the Internet (almost). Each of these searching sites listed works differently; so which one you use depends greatly on what you seek. To make the game interesting, let's say we're looking for a company to translate Hungarian to French. We're also hoping to find an old friend in the States. And we want to find a printer in Poland. ** Yahoo Yahoo is the oldest and largest index of the Internet. The first page presents you with 14 main catagories (Arts, Business, Science, etc) and a facility to search for keywords. A search on the word "translation" takes you to a section listing 147 translation companies. Among them, several offer Hungarian language services and can transact their business over the net. Search completed. Now let's find our Polish printer. A search on "printing" yields 261 companies offering printing services. But none seem to be in Poland. At this point you can run a search for the word "Poland" within the selection we've found. Unfortunately, this search yields nothing. What next? Yahoo directs you to a number of other search engines that may be more comprehensive. We'll take a look at two of those in a minute. ** Hungary Directory As we've seen, Yahoo is useful for searching the US-based, English-language Internet. However the net is roughly doubling every year, and some of the fastest growth is taking place outside the States. That means we need more topic-specific indexes. One such site is the Hungary Directory. The Hungary Directory works in Hungarian and English, at least in theory. Searching on the term "printing" yielded nothing. However the Hungarian term equivalent, "nyomda" yielded two Hungarian printers. Of course, we were looking for Polish printers. Unfortunately there's still no Polish equivalent of the Hungary Directory, so it's time to move on to the search engines. ** Alta Vista Indexes break the net into carefully defined categories, but this takes time and human effort. Perhaps nobody has yet created an index of Polish printing houses. To sift the haystack for that single needle we need a search engine. Alta Vista is perhaps the most powerful engine on the net. A simple search on the word "Poland" returns roughly 70,000 matches. The art of the search engine is in narrowing the search. All this is explained in the Alta Vista "Help" section. For example, a search on "printers AND Poland" yields a charity seeking donations of printing equipment for Poland, a Polish business sending computers and printers, and a list called "Printer Suppliers in Poland in 1994." We need to narrow the search yet further. A search on ""offset printing" AND Poland gives you a list of 700 sites, including several offering offset printing services. Alas, none are Poland-based. A similar search on "'offset printing' AND Hungary" also came up dry. However "'nyomda" AND Hungary" called up the two Hungarian printers we found previously. Conclusion: either there's nothing on the net about Polish printers, or we should try searching in the Polish-language. ** Excite As a last resort, let's try Excite, an engine that lets you enter a search as a human language query. Excite also lets you search Usenet, web reviews, and Usenet classifieds. Unfortunately a search on "offset printers based in Poland" returns nothing useful. You can't find what doesn't exist. Before we leave Excite, it's worth mentioning their personal page service. When you fill out a form describing your prefered subjects and web sites, Excite creates for you a customized page of links. A few other websites are now offering this service, including Ziff-Davis publications and Microsoft . ** WhoWhere Speaking of Microsoft, let's see if we can find our old friend Bill Gates. WhoWhere is the place to hunt down email addresses. A search on "Bill Gates, Microsoft" reveals "27 highly relevant matches." That should read "hilarous matches." Among the addresses registered to Bill are: Billy Boy, Millionaire, Satan, Big Daddy, and William Q. IHaveMoreMoneyThanYou Gates. Are the geeks at Redmond having a little fun at the boss' expense? WhoWhere doesn't find everybody. In particular, it has trouble with addresses at the online services, like America Online and CompuServe. ** Switchboard Switchboard claims to list addresses and phone numbers of 90 million persons in the US and 10 million businesses. Not suprisingly, there's no listing for William H. Gates, although it seems two other Bill Gates live in the state of Washington. Like WhoWhere, Switchboard is by no means comprehensive. Needless to say there's no Hungary-based version. Yet. ** DejaNews Usenet is the conversation center of the Internet. A search on Bill Gates reveals that, while a lot of people are discussing Bill, he's not said anything on Usenet. That's right, you can use DejaNews to see if your friends are saying anything on Usenet. Or if others are talking about you. Rather spooky. ** Conclusions These tools can help you find nearly anything on the Internet, but only if it's already there. We found two of our three objectives fairly easily. But still, we failed to find our Polish printer. Disappointing? Not really. At the pace the net is growing you can be sure these services will appear soon. WWW: ---------------------------------------------------- Copyright (c) iSYS Hungary 1996. Permission granted to redistribute this article in electronic form for non-profit purposes only. My byline and this message must remain intact. Contact me for reprint rights. ---------------------------------------------------- This column is also published in the Budapest Business Journal Steven Carlson, iSYS Hungary Hungary's business Internet provider Online Europe list Author - Hungary Online "Only the educated are free." - Epictetus, Discourses ############# # This message to Hungary-Online-announce@hungary.yak.net # was from steve@isys.hu (Steven Carlson) # # To unsubscribe, # send "unsubscribe" to # For a full subscription (rather than this announcement-only subscription) # mail "subscribe" to # Send mail to for more information, # or to if you need human assistance. #############