There is little doubt that the databases of the online world contain nearly everything needed to complete a major research project, fuel an information-needy business, or just help get the school homework done.
Online research is faster, provides more depth and is cross-referenced to help researchers locate obscure resources. It makes you an "instant expert" on a subject matter. The main problem is learning how to get a confident grip on the searching process.
Experienced users regularly "clip" news from online services, and store selected parts of what they get on their personal computers' hard disks. They use powerful tools to search their data, and know how to use the information in other applications. (More about clipping in Chapter 11.)
Regular clipping of news is highly recommended. It is often quicker and easier to search your own databases, than to search online. Your data is a subset of previous searches. Therefore, the stories on your disk are likely to have a high degree of relevancy.
There are many good programs for personal computers that let you search your personal data for information. See Chapter 14 for ideas.
While secondary research can never replace primary information gathering, it often satisfies most information needs related to any task or project. Besides, it points in the direction of primary sources from where more in- depth information may be elicited.
Regular "clipping" can help you build a powerful personal database, but it will never satisfy all information needs. Occasionally, you must go online for additional facts.
When this happens, you may feel like Don Quixote, as he was looking "for a needle in a bottle of hay." The large number of offerings is bewildering. To succeed, you'll need a sound search strategy.
Your first task is to locate useful sources of information. The next, to decide how best to find that specific piece of information online. You must plan your search.
Although one source of information, like an online database, is supposed to cover your area of interest, it may still be unable to give you what you want. Let me explain with an example:
You're tracking a company called IBM (International Business Machines). Your first inclination is to visit forums and clubs concerned with products delivered by this company. There, you plan to search message bases and file libraries. The search term IBM will probably give so many hits that you almost drown. To find anything of interest in these forums, your search terms must be very specific. General news providers, like Associated Press, may be a better alternative. Usually, they just publish one or two stories on IBM per week. Don't expect to learn about details that are not of interest to the public. AP's stories may be too general for you. Maybe you'll be more content with industry insiders' expert views, as provided by the Brainwave for NewsNet newsletters OUTLOOK ON IBM, or THE REPORT ON IBM.
The level of details in a given story depends in part on the news providers' readers, and the nature of the source. The amount of "noise" (the level of irrelevancy) also varies. In most public forums, expect to wade through many uninteresting messages before finding things of interest.
Try the following strategy:
Step 1:
Locate sources that provide relevant information, Selecting sources is half the battle in making a good search!
You probably won't find what you need if you're not looking in the right place.Step 2: Check if the information from these sources is at a
satisfactory level of details, and that the volume
is acceptable (not too much, nor too little).Step 3: Study the service's search commands and procedures,
PLAN, and then SEARCH.
Step 1 is not an easy one. There is such an abundance of directory services and pointers.
On the Internet, two free favorite starting points are Digital Equipment Corp.'s Alta Vista service, and HotBot.
The Alta Vista search service indexes millions of Web pages, and maintains a full-text index of more than 8,000 Usenet newsgroups updated in real- time. Its Advanced Option lets you limit a search by giving start and end dates, by combining words and phrases using AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR operators.
Check out Alta Vista at http://www.altavista.digital.com/ (USA), or some of its mirrors (local copies of the service) around the world for speed. It offers searches in over 25 languages.
It's only worth using Alta Vista if you bear in mind the sort of material which might be posted in your subject area. Since anyone can publish almost anything on the Web, pages vary - from personal pages set up by any student who has Internet access, to those set up academic or research institutions, those set up by not-for-profit organizations, and those from commercial organizations.
In August 1996, HotBot (http://www.HotBot.com) claimed an index of 54 million full-text Web pages, plus Usenet newsgroups and selected Internet mailing lists. This is far more than Alta Vista has, and in some cases it will let you find more.
HotBot supports Boolean AND/OR/NOT, and phrase searching. It provides relevance feedback with retrieval. It also supports chronological, domain, and geographic searches, as well as media type searches such as Java, VRML, and Acrobat, but does not have as powerful search features as Alta Vista.
Sometimes, I play Alta Vista against HotBot for maximum result. If I want a query to contain a string from a Web address, Alta Vista would be my first choice. If I want currency and depth, then I'd usually prefer HotBot. In other cases, network access speed will decide. If getting to one of them takes to long, I go to the other.
Watch these strong competitors:
http://www.excite.com
http://ultra.infoseek.com/.
Meta-search agents let you search several search engines in one operation. For example, Super Searches (http://www.searches.com/) searches major search engines like Alta Vista, Excite, Galaxy, HotBot, Lycos, Web Crawler, Yahoo, WWW Yellow pages, Meta crawler, DejaNews, Aliweb, Hotbot, Lycos, and more.
Here are some others to try:
Dogpile: http://www.dogpile.com Highway61: http://www.highway61.com/
One word of warning: The meta-search agents treat the product of search engines as data: changing it, organizing it, and making it simpler to use for the consumer, without understanding that this information is more like a publication than raw data.
Usually, these services do not support Boolean, temporal, or proximity operators. Set building is not possible.
Narrowing a search down to a specific topic area can be a challenge with the general search engines. Sometimes, you may be better off using a more targeted search service.
There are many services linking you to topic area search engines. Example: SEARCH.COM (http://www.search.com/) links you to search services within areas like Arts, Automotive, Business, Computers, Directories, Education, Employment, Entertainment, Finance, Government, Games, Health, Housing, Legal, Lifestyle, News, People, Politics, Reference, Science, Shopping, Sports, Travel, Usenet, and Web.
Some other interesting offerings:
http://www.newsindex.com/ Today's news. http://www.newstrawler.com Archives of yesterday's news http://www.cosmix.com/motherload/ Many topic areas. http://www2.zdnet.com/locator/ Computer companies, hardware,
software, peripherals.http://www.webplaces.com/search/ Clip art, icons, background
images, animations, sound clipshttp://www.achoo.com Health http://www.Healthatoz.com Health http://thegw.com Games on the Internet. http://www.cyberark.com/noah.htm Animals http://www.nlsearch.com/ Includes special collection of
4 million articles not on other search engineshttp://www.searchz.com For Online Advertisers, Marketers, and E-Commerce
No search engine indexes the whole Web, and most US based services tend to be best at US contents. US services focusing on other geographical areas tend to miss local organizations having registered .com, .org, or other global addresses.
For contents in other geographical areas, you may be better served by engines specialized on these areas. Examples:
Europe: http://www.euroferret.com/
http://euroseek.freeside.net/
India: http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/4195/india.htm
India/Pakistan/
Sri Lanka/Nepal/
Bangladesh: http://www.samilan.com/
Israel: http://www.vci.co.il/
Middle East: http://www.arabseek.net/
Russia: http://search.interrussia.com/
Scandinavia: http://www.polarsearch.com/
South Africa: http://www.ananzi.co.za/
United Kingdom: http://www.cybersearch.co.uk
More links: http://www.beaucoup.com/1geoeng.html
There are major structural differences between languages. An indexing system built for English text may therefore not be suitable for a text written in the language you're searching, and in particular if the other language uses special fonts. Using special purpose search engines may be the way to go in such cases. Some options:
Arabic: http://www.alidrisi.com/main1.htm
Chinese: http://www.sohoo.com.cn/
French: http://lokace.iplus.fr/
http://www.ecila.fr
German: http://www.aladin.de/
http://www.dino-online.de/suche.html
Italian: http://ragno.ats.it/indexuk.html
Japanese: http://www.juno.sfc.keio.ac.jp/NSE-NS/
http://www.lawresearch.com/v2/Cejapan.htm
Spanish: http://www.ctv.es/USERS/gobib/hispano.html
Another problem using the English language search systems is that you don't just have to understand English to get the most out of them, you'll have to understand English well.
After searching the Web, my next step is usually The Deja News Research Service, a large indexed database of archived Usenet news from over 15,000 topic-specific groups. It typically gives you access to Usenet ranging back to March, 1995. This amounts to over 175 Gbytes of searchable data (April 1997). URL: http://www.dejanews.com/
You can use the service for research, or to locate interesting newsgroups worth your subscription.
DejaNews' filter lets you limit what records will be searched by a query. A search can be limited by date, author, and newsgroup name (using wildcards, or range operators), OR and AND boolean operators, wildcards (compan* matches companies, company, etc.). You can combine search elements using parentheses, and more.
The order of the records in the hit list reflects how often the words you're searching for appear, as well as the importance you have given the posting date. This scoring gives you the records that best match your search at the top of the list.
Once you have found an interesting message in a hitlist, you can retrieve the thread by clicking on the subject line as it appears at the top of the screen.
InfoSeek is a commercial service on the World Wide Web that allows you to search many Internet newsgroups, news and business information from real- time newswires, publications, broadcast programs, financial and government databases, World Wide Web pages, mailing list archives, and technical support information (including over a year of Computer Select database of the full-text and abstracts of about 100 computer magazines).
Queries can be entered as plain English, or by just entering key words and phrases. Point your browser at http://www.infoseek.com. There is a Japanese language version at http://japan.infoseek.com.
Reference.COM (Chapter 11) indexes messages posted to several mailing lists and Web forum. This includes KIDLINK's announcement lists, and this handbook's support forum (The list TOW at listserv@listserv.nodak.edu).
Several mailing lists let you search their archives of postings through the Web. For example, all postings to the TOW mailing list since 1993 can be searched at http://listserv.nodak.edu/archives/tow.html. Hits can be filtered by strings found on the subject line, strings in the author's email address, or by giving a date range.
Microsoft lets you search several of their mailing lists, including those on ATL, ActiveX, Active Server Pages Scripting, Authenticode, CIFS, Client Scripting, Cryptographic API, Distributed COM-Based Code, Internet Explorer Html. See http://microsoft.ease.lsoft.com/Archives/index.html.
Some other examples:
At http://listserv.hea.ie/lists/, there are many lists focusing on Irish, Celtic and Gaelic culture and languages.
The http://list.nih.gov/archives/ page leads mainly to medicine and health related lists, while http://listserv.nodak.edu/archives/ carries all public KIDLINK lists.
Other sites include
http://listserv.spc.edu/archives/
http://listserv.american.edu/archives/
http://listserv.uta.edu/archives/
Catalist (http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html) is the official catalog of LISTSERV mailing lists. This site lets you search for mailing lists of interest. It guides you to their web archive interface, if available. The LISTSERV web archive interface allows you to search the list's archive, and browse postings chronologically.
If you are looking for more specialized databases, try The Internet Sleuth (http://www.isleuth.com/). It links to over 3,000 searchable databases on the Internet on a wide variety of subjects.
Sleuth's categories include: Agriculture, Economics, Internet, Regional, Education, Legal, Sciences, Astronomy, Employment, Literature, Shopping, Aviation, Engineering, Mathematics, Social Sciences, Biology, Physics, Entertainment, Medicine, Software, BioSciences, Environment, Arts, Music, Sports, Business, Finance, News, Technology, Business Directories, Food & Drink, People, Trade & Industry, Chemistry, Genealogy, Travel, Commercial Databases, Government, Politics, Usenet News, Companies, Health, Computer Related, Recreation, Veterinary, Humanities, Reference, Web Search Engines.
Then, there's the Invisible Web. These are the terabytes of information available in digital form through hidden databases that cannot be seen or searched directly by most Web search engines.
If your success is still meagre, consider asking other onliners for advice. Actually, as this may often be a fast way to interesting sources, you may even want to put it higher on your list.
When looking for information about agriculture and fisheries, visit forums and conferences about related topics. Ask members what they are using.
If you want information about computers or electronics, ask in such conferences.
When you do not know where to start your search, ask others!
Their know-how is usually the quickest way to the sources.
DejaNews will help you locate relevant newsgroups for your questions. To find interesting mailing lists, check out the Liszt Index of Electronic Mailing Lists at http://www.liszt.com/. It can also be searched by email to liszter@bluemarble.net. Send a blank message for instructions.
The Liszt Index lets you enter any word or phrase to search their directory of over 84,792 listserv, listproc, majordomo and independently managed mailing lists (as of November, 1997). It will not allow you to search the message bases, but it sure will help you locate potentially interesting discussions.
The Listserv home page (http://www.tile.net/tile/listserv/index.html) lets you sort LISTSERV discussion groups by 1st letter of list name, by country, by server name, and more. The description pages of the individual discussion groups, however, is not to much help. Try Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists at http://www.neosoft.com/internet/paml/index.html for an alternative.
Also, there are over 250,000 Web based discussion forums (June 26, 1998). By November 25, 1996, the number was just 37,000. Search for discussions of interest at http://www.forumone.com/.
Note: There is much free information on the Internet, but be prepared to pay for current and relevant information. Your payment is for filtering, sorting, and emphasizing of what matters to you.
Some online services let you retrieve their user information manuals by modem for free. Others send them to all users, while some charge extra for them. If they do, buy! They're worth their weight in gold.
The user manuals from commercial services like Dialog, and CompuServe make good reading. The latter two also publish monthly magazines filled with search tips, information about new sources, user experiences, and more. Dialog distributes the monthly newsletter Chronolog.
Whenever it is possible to retrieve these help texts in electronic form, consider doing that. It is often faster to search a help file on your disk, than to browse through a book.
Professional information searchers watch the activity in the online world. They subscribe to announcements about new offerings, regularly search databases for new sources of information, and read about new services.
On most online services, you can search databases of available offerings, and a section with advertisements about their own 'superiorities'. Keep an eye on what is being posted there.
There's an announcement-only service at listserv@cs.wisc.edu called NET-HAPPENINGS. It is a favorite for monitoring Internet's offerings.
The service distributes announcements about tools, conferences, calls for papers, news items, new mailing lists, electronic newsletters like EDUPAGE, and more. Send a message with the word "help" in the body of the text for subscription information. Note: Consider using the digest option (send the command SET NET-HAPPENINGS DIGEST on a separate line after your SUBscribe request). You can also set it to Index for even shorter notifications (SET NET-HAPPENINGS INDEX).
Net-happenings is also distributed through comp.internet.net-happenings. The full net-happenings archives can be searched and retrieved at http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/net-hap/index.html.
NEW-LIST regularly distribute notices about new discussion lists (conferences). Subscribe by email to listserv@HYPATIA.CS.WISC.EDU. Use the following command:
SUB NEW-LIST Your-first-name Your-last-name
You can search and browse the NEW-LIST list's notification postings at http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/new-list/. To search for a posting before July 1, 1998, use the archive at http://LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU/archives/new-list.html.
There's also an announcements list of new Internet message boards/forums called New-Forum. Subscribe by sending any message to new-forum-subscribe@makelist.com.
"Seidman's Online Insider" at http://techweb.cmp.com/ng/online_insider/ is an informative newsletter. You can subscribe to have it delivered weekly to your Internet mailbox. Send mail to listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com. In the BODY of your mail enter: SUBSCRIBE ONLINE-L [Your Full Name] .
Heriot-Watt University Library (Scotland) publishes the free _INTERNET RESOURCES_ Newsletter. Emphasis is on Engineering, Science, and Social Science related sources in the United Kingdom. You can read it at
http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/irn.html
You can subscribe to have an alerting message, plus the table of contents sent via email, each time a new issue appears.
The Usenet newsgroup alt.internet.services focuses on information about services available on the Internet. Services for discussion include:
Every second week, a list of Internet services called the "Special Internet Connections list" is posted to this newsgroup. It includes everything from where to retrieve pictures from space by FTP, how to find agricultural information, public UNIX, online directories and books, you name it.
Brainwave for NewsNet lets you read and search the following newsletters: Worldwide Videotex Update, Worldwide Databases (#PB44), Online Newsletter, The Online Newsletter, the Information and Database Publishing Report, and The Online Libraries and Microcomputers.
They can also be read and searched on Dialog and Data-Star, as part of the Information Access PTS Newsletter Database. Information Access is a full-text database with specialized newsletters for business and industry.
On The Well, read the "News from Around Well Conferences" topic to learn about developments.
The LINK-UP magazine is an interesting paper source. In North America, contact Learned Information Inc., 143 Old Mariton Pike, Medford, NJ 08055- 8707, U.S.A. In Europe: Learned Information (Europe) Ltd., Woodside, Hinskey Hill, Oxford OX1 5AU, England. An online version is available through ZiffNet's Business Database Plus on CompuServe.
Two monthly magazines, Information World Review and FULLTEXT SOURCES ONLINE from BiblioData Inc. (U.S.A.), are also available through Learned Information. (BiblioData, P.O. Box 61, Needham Heights, MA 02194, U.S.A.) Learned Information's "Learned InfoNet" is at
http://info.learned.co.uk/
Brainwave for NewsNet has the newsletter Information Today from Learned Information. It covers online services, CD-ROM, multimedia, imaging, library automation, electronic networking and publishing, document delivery, copyright issues, and the hardware and software essential to the delivery of electronic information.
Scott Yanoff updates an interesting, selected list of Internet resources twice per month. Get it by email from inetlist@aug3.augsburg.edu, or from
http://www.spectracom.com/islist/ ftp://ftp.csd.uwm.edu/pub/inet.services.txt
John December's "Information Sources: the Internet and Computer-Mediated Communication" has pointers to information describing the Internet, computer networks, and issues related to computer-mediated communication. It lists Internet texts for new users, comprehensive Internet guides, and specialized and technical information. At http://www.december.com/cmc/info/index.html
The Gale Directory of Databases contains detailed descriptions of over 10,000 publicly available databases accessible through an online vendor or batch processor or for purchase on CD-ROM, diskette, or magnetic tape, or as a handheld product (Feb, 1996). It is a comprehensive guide to the electronic database industry worldwide.
The directory is available in print, on CD-ROM, through Dialog and other commercial services, and through Gale Research's subscription-based Web service (at http://www.gale.com/). They also offer listings of database producers and vendors, and a free Gale Guide to Internet Databases called Cyberhound On-line (http://www.cyberhound.com).
For lists of electronic journals about the Internet ("E-zines" or "Ejournals"), click at http://www.edoc.com/ejournal/
Several electronic journals and newsletters are available through the Internet, covering fields from literature to molecular biology. For a large list, try http://www.meer.net/~johnl/e-zine-list/.
The NEWSLTR list distributes various network newsletters. Subscribe by email to listserv@listserv.nodak.edu. Offerings include: Edupage, Hitek, HPC, Infosys, IAT Inforbit, and many more.
The Argus Clearinghouse offers over 1,000 topical guides to the Internet's information resources. The guides are created by librarians and other information professionals, and cover a diverse range of topics, from Theatre, Law, and Chemistry to Midwifery. Access on this Web address: http://www.clearinghouse.net/
Interested in CD-ROM? The database at http://www.microinfo.co.uk/ offers details about thousands of information products and services - mainly CD- ROMs. Products are classified in 27 topics ranging from agriculture and food to theology.
We cannot give a simple, universal recipe valid for all online services. The best approach on one service, may be useless on others.
Besides, recommendations will vary considerably depending on whether you want "focused searches" designed to find and retrieve a specific set of documents providing a specific set of information, or "satisficed searches" designed to find just some hits that are "good enough" regardless of the source.
On some services, searching starts by selecting databases or type of source. This may help you get rid of some irrelevancies. On other services, this selection is assumed.
The next step is to enter your search words (or text strings), and a valid time frame (as in "between 1/1/90 and 1/1/91"), where such an option is available.
Here are some sample search terms used on the net:
SONY AND VIDEO The term SONY and the term VIDEO. Both
words must be present in the document
to give a match.
VIDEO* search for all words starting with
VIDEO. "*" is a wild-card character
referring to any ending of the word.
VIDEO* matches words like VIDEOTEXT
and VIDEOCONFERENCE.
SONY WITHIN/10 VIDEO Both words must be present in the text,
but they must not be farther apart than
ten words. (Proximity operators)
IBM OR APPLE Either one word OR the other.
Some services have adjacency operators, and some automatic truncation. Truncation allows searching on different word endings or plurals with the use of a truncation wild card symbol. For example, if the truncation symbol is *, then the search term econ* will return items that contain economics, economy, economic, and econometric. Car* will return items that contain cars and cartoon, so it is advisable to use truncation symbols carefully.
Many services let you reuse your search terms in new search commands. This may save you time (and money), when you get too many hits. For example: if IBM OR APPLE gives 1,000 hits, limit the search by adding "FROM JANUARY 1st.," or by adding the search word "NOTEBOOK*".
Most services offer full online documentation of their search commands. You can read the help text on screen while connected, or retrieve it for later study. Expect the quality of these texts to be variable, but browse them all the same.
Make a note about the following general tricks:
is called Boolean searching. It allows search terms to be put into logical groups by the use of connective terms.
Using AND, OR, and NOT search operators may seem confusing at first, unless you already understand the logic. Here are some hints that you may find helpful:
Use the Boolean operator AND to retrieve smaller amounts of information. Use AND when multiple words must be present in your search results (MERCEDES AND VOLVO AND CITROEN AND PRICES).
Use OR to express related concepts or synonyms for your search term (FRUIT OR APPLES OR PEARS OR BANANAS OR PEACHES).
The purpose of NOT is avoid listings of irrelevant records. Be careful when using this operator. NOT gets rid of any record in a database that contains the word that you've "notted" out. For example, searching for "IBM NOT APPLE" drops records containing the sentence, "IBM and Apple are computer giants." The record will be dropped, even if this is the only mention of Apple in an article, and though it is solely about IBM.
Use NOT to drop sets of hits that you have already seen. Use NOT to exclude records with multiple meanings, like "CHIPS Not POTATO" (if you are looking for chips rather than snack foods).
Often, it pays to start with a "quick-and-dirty" search by throwing in words you think will do the trick. Then, look at the first five or 10 records, but look only at the headline and the indexing. This will show you what terms are used by indexers to describe your idea and the potential for confusion with other ideas.
Use proximity operators to search multiword terms. If searching for "market share," you want the two words within so many words of another. The order of the words, however, doesn't matter. You can accept both "market share" and "share of the market."
Some claim that boolean searches only find between 20 - 25 percent of the relevant information. The problem is that you must know the terms to search on before you begin. Many people don't know these terms and cannot guess them.
Several online services are busy trying to supply better "search engines" using techniques like natural language searching, relevance ranking, and concept searching.
Relevance ranking tries to measure how closely the retrieval matches the query, usually in quantitative terms between 0 and 100 or 0 and 1,000. It usually provides a ranked listing of search results, with a score for the relevance of the result, based on the occurrences of the terms used and also their position in the document. It provides somewhat the same results as AND searching. Also, it offers the benefits of OR searching as all the terms in a query need not be present in the result.
Alta Vista (http://www.altavista.digital.com/) offers both boolean and enhanced relevance ranking searches. For example, you can require that selected terms be found in the results. The query "+apples +bananas oranges" will not find a document missing the words apples and bananas. Those files that contain oranges will listed before those that do not contain this word, but files without this word will also be listed.
Some services let you search specific types of information. For example, Alta Vista allows searches for characters or words in an URL (a Web address), or a hyperlink.
Application: My Web pages are at http://home.eunet.no/~presno/. The query "+link:eunet.no/~presno/ -url:eunet.no/~presno/" will most likely find all links to my pages on other Web servers except my own. The "-" character in front of a word works as a NOT operator. The "link:" phrase is for searching in hyperlinks across the Internet. The "url:" code lets you search in the URL addresses of the found pages.
Key Word In Context (KWIC) searching will return the key word and N words near the key word to give the user the context in which the key word was found.
Phrase Searching allows searching of phrases when available. Note that some systems can be confusing if you think "Online World" is searching the two words together as a phrase, when in fact the engine is searching Online OR World.
Fuzzy searching is another interesting concept. This option allows you to search when you don't know the exact spelling of the word. Some systems use the Soundex algorithm invented over 70 years ago to search name files. Names that sound alike should have the same Soundex number. It uses these basic rules:
Note: The information available in English language may be just a small part of that available in a country's national language. When English language sources fail to meet the need at hand, consider the services of a skilled bilingual searcher.
Spelling errors are very common reasons for search failures. Make sure you have that terminology term or person's name right. Also, names are not spelled the same way in all countries, and those who produce texts also make spelling errors. For example, the name of the composer Tchaikowsky is supposedly spelled in 36 different ways on the nets. 'Ciaikovsky' is one of them.
The commands used to find files are similar to those used in traditional databases. Often, you can limit the search by library, date, file name, or file extension. You can search for text strings in the description of the contents of a file, or use key words.
On the Internet, the Virtual Shareware Library is a favorite. The page at
http://castor.acs.oakland.edu/cgi-bin/vsl-front
links to a front end which catalogues about 120,000 software files available from the 22 largest shareware and freeware archives on the Internet (1996). Its search engine lets you search descriptions, locate, retrieve, or order files.
Narrow your search by stating the desired hardware or software platform, as in Commodore Amiga, Atari, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Novell Netware, IBM OS/2, Unix/Linux, etc.
Use Boolean operators (AND and NOT), specify case requirements, use wildcards (like *, | and ?), delimit by file creation dates, demand matches in paths and file names, and limit the size of the search report.
Using a program like Netscape, just click on the desired files to have them transferred to your local disk. Easy.
To search a huge database of files on the Internet, try FTP Search at http://ftpsearch.ntnu.no/ftpsearch. In September 1996, their index contained over 62 million files.
FTP Search features advanced search options to help you narrow down to the file you want, including case insensitive/sensitive substring searches, limiting to a given domain and path, as well as many formatting options.
On bulletin board systems, there are many different search methods.
Example: You're visiting a bulletin board based on the BBS program RBBS-PC. You want a program that can show GIF graphics picture files. Such files are typically described like this:
VUIMG31.EXE 103105 07-15-91 GIF*/TIFF/PCX Picture Viewer/Printer
From left to right: file name, size in bytes, date available, and a 40 character description.You can search the file descriptions for the string "gif". You do this by entering the term "s gif all". This will probably give you a list of files. Some will have the letters GIF in the file name. Others will have them in the description field.
CompuServe has several special "Find this File" services.
On Usenet, it is easy. Simply connect to The Deja News Research Service above. Many mailing lists maintain log files, and offer ways of searching them. Often, you must be a subscriber to search, so it is more cumbersome. Many services have commands for selective reading of messages. For example, on CompuServe you can limit your search to given sections. You can also select messages to be read based on text strings in the subject titles. The command
rs;s;CIS Access from Japan;62928
displays all messages with the text "CIS Access from Japan" in their subject titles starting with message number 62928. Most users have their programs do this automatically for them. For examples, OzWin and TAPCIS handles this well. Such message filtering is also common in Usenet newsreaders. For example, the Free Agent program from Forte Advanced Management Software, Inc. lets you go online to retrieve message headers, mark off those you want to read, and then call back to retrieve the selected message bodies. (Free Agent is at http://www.forteinc.com/forte/.)
When searching a database stored on another continent, then the speed of response may be a problem. In such cases, note that several databases on the Internet can be searched by email. Reference.COM (Chapter 11) allows for searching of Usenet postings, while the Agora-servers let you search many databases using World Wide Web by email services (Chapter 12). MCI Mail and MCI Fax have a program called Information Advantage, under which online services and newsletters can deliver search results and other information over the online services. Dialog, Dun & Bradstreet, and Individual Inc. have signed up for the program. You can request a search by direct email to say Dialog. The search results will be returned to you via MCI Mail or MCI Fax.
For instructions about how to get a directory of LISTSERV based mailing lists, send the following email message:
To: listserv@listserv.nodak.edu Subject: (keep this blank) Text: LIST GLOBAL
You will receive a LONG list of available sources of information. The list dated March 8, 1996, had over twenty-three thousand lines. Each mailing list is described with two lines. Here are some examples from the list:
Network-wide ID Host address and list description
AARWA-L listserv@postoffice.cso.uiuc.edu
African & Africa Related Women's Assoc. (AARWA)
AAT-L AAT-L-request@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU
Art & Architecture Thesaurus Discussion List
ACADEMIA listserv@technion.technion.ac.il
Academia - Forum on Higher Education in Israel
BBS-TR listserv@vm.ege.edu.tr
BBS Listesi (Turkish)
CAPES-L listproc@listas.ansp.br
Grupo de discussao da CAPES
EUROTRI_CV majordomo@uv.es
Foro de las OTRIs de la Comunidad Valenciana
HIRIS-L listserv@icineca.cineca.it
HIgh Resolution Infrared Spectroscopy - List
The column "Network-wide ID" contains the names of the mailing lists. "Full address and list description" contains the email addresses that members use when submitting discussion items, and a short textual description of each conference. Keep the list on your hard disk. This makes it easier to find sources of information, when you need them.
These mailing list, also often called 'discussion list', work like online conferences or message sections on bulletin boards, but technically they are different. (Read about KIDLINK in Chapter 2 for background information.) All these lists are controlled by a program called LISTSERV on the host given under "Full address" above. Thus, to subscribe or signoff to the AAT-L mailing list above, write to listserv@listserv.uic.edu. Mailing lists offer "conferencing" with the following important functions:
The term "Network-wide ID" signifies that you do not need to subscribe by email to the host running a mailing list's LISTSERV. If there is a LISTSERV on a host in a country closer to where you live, then you can subscribe to this rather than to the remote. This helps keep the total costs of the international network down.
Example:
You live in Norway. There is a LISTSERV in nearby Finland at listserv@fiport.funet.fi. You can send your AAT-L subscription request (SUBSCRIBE AAT-L FirstName LastName) to this address, rather than to listserv@uicvm.uic.edu.
Use the addresses in column two when sending messages to the other members of the discussion lists, but DO NOT send your subscription requests to this address!! Your mail will be forwarded to all members. Chances are that nothing will happen, while everybody will see how sloppy you are. So, you subscribe by sending a command to a LISTSERV. The method is similar to what we did when subscribing to Infonets in Chapter 7. If your name is Jens Jensen, and you want to subscribe to CAPES-L, send this message to a LISTSERV:
To: (enter a preferred LISTSERV address here) Subject: (You can write anything here. Will be ignored.) Text: SUB CAPES-L Jens Jensen
When your subscription has been registered, a confirmation text will be returned to you. Note that some mailing lists will ask you to return a subscription confirmation before accepting. From now on, all messages sent to the list will be forwarded to your mailbox. (Send "SIGNOFF CAPES-L" to this address to unsubscribe from the mailing list.) Some lists will forward each message to you upon receipt. Others will send a periodic digest (weekly, monthly, etc.). To send a message to HIRIS-L, send to the address in column two above. Send to
HIRIS-L@ICINECA.CINECA.IT
Review the following example. Most mailing lists will accept these commands.
CHINA-NN is listed as follows in the List of Lists:
CHINA-NN listserv@asuvm.inre.asu.edu (Peered)
China News Digest (Global News)
You can send your subscription request to listserv@asuvm.inre.asu.edu. Scandinavians may subscribe by mail to listserv@fiport.funet.fi. North American users can also send their mail to listserv@listserv.nodak.edu. If your name is Winston Hansen, write the following command in the TEXT of the message
SUB CHINA-NN Winston Hansen
When you want to leave CHINA-NN, send a cancellation message like this to the LISTSERV where you subscribed:
To: listserv@asuvm.inre.asu.edu Subject: (nothing here) SIGNOFF CHINA-NN
If you subscribed through listserv@fiport.funet.fi, sending the SIGNOFF command to listserv@asuvm.inre.asu.edu will get you nowhere. Send to listserv@fiport.funet.fi. Never send the SIGNOFF command to the discussion list itself! Always send to the LISTSERV.
Many mailing lists maintain logs of messages sent through the list. Search commands differ both by mailing list system, and version number. Check with the administrator or other members of your lists about how to search these resources. To search mailing list log files controlled by listserv@listserv.nodak.edu, send an email with the following command in the text of your mail:
search <keyword> in <list name>
Replace <keyword> with your desired search term, and <list name> by the name of the list. Example: To find all messages in the log files of the KIDLINK mailing list containing the word "janeiro" (as in Rio de Janeiro), send the following command to the Listserv's email address:
search janeiro in Kidlink
The Listserv returns the following type of report (Abbreviated. Only the first hit is shown below):
From: "L-Soft list server at North Dakota HECN (1.8c)"
> search janeiro in kidlink
-> 15 matches.
Item # Date Time Recs Subject
------ ---- ---- ---- -------
000373 93/10/06 00:06 54 The first response from France
To order a copy of these postings, send the following command:
GETPOST KIDLINK 373
>>> Item #373 (6 Oct 1993 06:46) - The first response from France
I will also give speeches in Maceio (the site of the
Portuguese language KIDLINK forums), Rio de Janeiro,
^^^^^^^
and Goiania/Goias. A lot of fun!
You could also restrict searches like this:
SEARCH search_string IN KIDLINK SINCE 96/01/01 SEARCH search_string IN KIDLINK WHERE SENDER CONTAINS NATHAN
Some Usenet information articles are being posted regularly. These texts tend to be useful both for novice and experienced users, and usually fall into one of these groups:
For a list of periodic postings, check out this page
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/
It will provide an alphabetic list of all Usenet FAQs found in the news.answers newsgroup. Many of the FAQs in this list are presented in the same format as they appear in the newsgroup, while others have been further processed and split into additional documents. Click on individual FAQs to read. The list of newsgroups and mailing lists is available on hosts that run Usenet News or NetNews servers and/or clients in the news.lists news group. The members of news.newusers.questions and alt.internet.access.wanted will readily accept your help requests.
The Galaxy service offers: Search Galaxy Pages, Find Galaxy Entries, Search the World Wide Web, Search Gopher Space, Search Hytelnet Services (includes traditional ``top-down'' interface), and has pointers to searchable indexes and databases at many other sites. Point your WWW browser at http://galaxy.einet.net/search.html
Free vs. commercial sources: On commercial online services, the profit motive provides continuous pressure to keep data plentiful and approachable. On the Internet, the information you'll find is there often because of someone's good will. So, unless the resource is sponsored or commercial in another another way, beware of outdated information.
With one command given to the commercial Northern light Search engine (at http://www.nlsearch.com/), users can hunt through more than 1,800 books, magazines, journals, newswires and databases that aren't generally available via the Web (1997). Searching the database is free, but there is a modest fee for documents actually retrieved. A typical item is said to cost about a dollar.
The list of sources is sorted by Arts & Entertainment, Business, Books & Literature, Careers, Cars, Computers, Education, Fashion, Food & Cooking, General Reference, Health & Fitness, History, Hobbies, Home Electronics, House, Investing, Kids, Military, News, Parenting, Product Information, Politics, Science, Special Interest, Sports, Vacations.
Their General Reference group includes Africa News Service, African Affairs, Aging, Asian Folklore Studies, Asian Survey, Business Wire, Collier's Encyclopedia, Compass Middle East Service, East European Politics & Societies, East European Quarterly, Economic Geography, Europe, Europe- Asia Studies, Futurist, Germanic Review, Greece & Rome, Inter Press Service, ITAR/TASS News Agency, Journal of Asian & African Studies, Journal of European Studies, Journal of International Affairs, Journal of Palestine Studies, Latin American Research Review, MEED Middle East Economic Digest, NACLA Report on the Americas, Pacific Affairs, Russian Life, Russian Review, Scandinavian Studies, SwissWORLD, UPI, World Press Review, Xinhua News Agency, Ziff-Davis Wire Highlights, and more.
The Electric Library (http://www.elibrary.com) has more than 1,000 publications in its archive (1996). Users can enter a plain English question to search over 900 full-text magazines, over 150 full-text newspapers, over 2,000 complete works of literature (Shakespeare, Monarch Notes), 20,000 photographs, news wires, television and radio transcripts, book, movie and software reviews, and Compton's Encyclopedia. They also have a dictionary, thesaurus, almanac, fact books, and more.
To garner new subscribers and keep current readers, magazine publishers turn to online services to create an ancillary electronic version of their print product. Their readers are being transformed from passive recipients of information into active participants in publishing.
You can "talk" with PC Magazine's writers through ZiffNet on CompuServe. Their forums function as expert sources. Here, you will often learn about products and trends sometimes before the magazines hit the newsstand.
Britain's two best-selling PC magazines share the PC Plus/PC Answers Online forum on CompuServe (GO PCPLUS). The Australian PC WEEK is at the Web address http://www.pcuser.com.au. Time magazine has a forum on America Online. There, readers can discuss with magazine reporters and editors, and even read the text of entire issues of Time electronically before it is available on newsstands.
Time Warner's Pathfinder (http://pathfinder.com) provides the full text of Time magazine, including a feature called Time Daily, updated with the latest stories each evening around 8 p.m. ET. InfoWorld used to have forums on the net, but stopped because they did not make any money off it. However, they still provide access to the full text of their news, views, and reviews through various means, including Computer Select, the Internet Shopping Network (http://www.internet.net), InfoSeek, LEXIS-NEXIS, Individual, NewsEdge, and DataTimes.
The Online World handbook, the one you are reading now, has a forum. For information about how to join, send email to listserv@listserv.nodak.edu. In the text of your message, write the command GET TOW.MASTER .
PC Magazine (U.S.A.) is one of those magazines that arrives here by mail. We butcher them, whenever we find something of interest. The "corpses" are dumped in a high pile on the floor. To retrieve a story in this pile is difficult and time consuming, unless the title is printed on the cover. Luckily, there are shortcuts. Connect to ZD Net Search. Here, you can search for stories. Once you have a list with title references, turning the pages gets much easier. However, as the articles are in full text, you may not want to hit for the floor at all.
On CompuServe, ZiffNet offers Computer Database Plus. It lets you search through more than 250,000 articles from over 200 popular newspapers and magazines. The oldest articles are from early 1987. Their database is also available on CD-ROM, but the discs cover only one year at a time.
CDP contains full-text from around 50 magazines, like Personal Computing, Electronic News, MacWeek and Electronic Business. Stories from the other magazines are available in abstracted form only.
To search, you pay extra per hour. In addition, you pay a fee per abstract and per full-text article. These fees are added to your normal CompuServe access rates.
ZiffNet also offers Magazine Database Plus, a database with stories from over 130 magazines (1994) covering science, business, sport, people, personal finance, family, art and handicraft, cooking, education, environment, travel, politics, consumer opinions, and reviews of books and films.
The magazines include: Administrative Management, Aging, Changing Times, The Atlantic, Canadian Business, Datamation, Cosmopolitan, Dun's Business Month, The Economist, The Futurist, High Technology Business, Journal of Small Business Management, Management Today, The Nation, The New Republic, Online, Playboy, Inc., Popular Science, Research & Development, Sales & Marketing Management, Scientific American, Technology Review, UN Chronicle, UNESCO Courier, U.S. News & World Report, and World Press Review. (In Chapter 11, we present another ZiffNet magazine database: the Business Database Plus.)
Magazine Index (MI), from Information Access Company (U.S.A.) covers over 500 consumer and general-interest periodicals as diverse as Special Libraries and Sky & Telescope, Motor Trend and Modern Maturity, Reader's Digest and Rolling Stone. Many titles go as far back as 1959.
Although most of the database consists of brief citations, MI also contains the complete text of selected stories from a long list of periodicals. It is available through Dialog, CompuServe, BRS, Data-Star, Nexis, Dow Jones Interactive, and others.
The Ei Compendex Plus database from Engineering Information in the U.S. offers information on various disciplines of engineering, from marine to chemical to electrical to nuclear. On CDP Online, Dialog, and Orbit.
What to do if you have so many references to a given magazine that you want to check it out? Try the Electronic Newsstand. It is available at the Web address http://www.enews.com/, and has links to over 2,000 magazine sites (1996). If you like, you can subscribe (with discounts) to over 300 of them.
Many libraries are accessible through the Internet. For a list of links to library web servers, look up Libweb: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Libweb, or webCATS (http://library.usask.ca/hywebcat/). Both Libweb and webCATS have geographical indexes with links to libraries in Africa, Americas, Asia/Pacific Rim, and Europe/Middle East.
Some libraries can be searched by Internet mail. This is the case with BIBSYS, a database operated by the Norwegian universities' libraries.
I am into transcendental meditation, and therefore constantly look for books on narrow topics like "mantra." To search BIBSYS for titles of interest, I sent a mail to genserv@pollux.bibsys.no. The search word was in the subject title of the message. By return email, I got the following report:
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 93 13:54:18 NOR
From: GENSERV@POLLUX.BIBSYS.NO
Subject: Searching BIBSYS
Search request : MANTRA
Database-id : BIBSYS
Search result : 5 hits.
The following is one of the references that I forwarded to my local library for processing:
Forfatter : Gonda, J.
Tittel : Mantra interpretation in the Satapatha-Brahmana
/ by J. Gonda.
Trykt : Leiden : E.J. Brill, 1988.
Sidetall : X, 285 s.
I serie : (Orientalia Rheno-traiectina ; 32)
ISBN : 90-04-08776-1
1 - UHF 90ka03324 - UHF/INDO Rh III b Gon
The British Library is at http://www.bl.uk/. The Web site "Book Lovers: Fine Books and Literature" has links to writers and poets, libraries, publishers and booksellers, both of new and second hand/antiquarian books. URL: http://www.xs4all.nl/~pwessel/
The Complete Guide to Online Bookstores is a handy guide to the net's offerings (at http://www.paperz.com/bookstores.html). Their list is broken down into categories like: Academic bookstores, Alternative, Archive, Australian, Automotive, Business & Career, Children's, City, Computer & Technical, Cooking, Co-Ops & Book Trading, Gay & Lesbian, General, German, Health & Nutrition, How-To, Israeli, Irish, Martial Arts, Medical & Chiropractic, Multilingual, Museum, Mystery & Fantasy, Future Fantasy, Nature, Organizational, Photographic, Progressive, Rare Books, Religious, Special Interest, Spiritual, Swedish, Travel, University & College, and more.
Roswell Computer Books Ltd.'s online book store (Canada) has a large database of titles. Check it out at http://www.roswell.com/. The Internet Book Shop in the United Kingdom offers over 750,000 (1995). It's URL is: http://www.bookshop.co.uk/.
Book Stacks Unlimited (http://www.books.com/) offers over 410,000 titles. Search online, read book reviews, enter order and credit card information to have the books shipped. They also offer several free virtual volumes. The competitor at http://www.amazon.com claims over 1.5 million titles.
For more on science fiction, retrieve a public copy of William Gibson's self-destructing electronic book "Agrippa" from ftp://bush.cs.tamu.edu//pub/misc/erich/agrippa . You may also want to browse a copy of a parody, at ftp://bush.cs.tamu.edu//pub/misc/erich/agr1ppa .
OCLC's WorldCat is a reference database covering books and materials in libraries worldwide. Their Online Union Catalog (OLUC) is the world's largest and most comprehensive bibliographic database. Web address: http://www.oclc.org.
The Peking University Library (Beijing, China) contains about 4,500,000 items. It includes 2,700,000 items in Chinese and 900,000 items in different foreign languages. There are also 650,000 volumes of periodicals and other documents and 160,000 rare books. At http://www.lib.pku.edu.cn.
Bookworms may appreciate the DOROTHYL list (listserv@kentvm.kent.edu), and especially if they like Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey and Dorothy L. Sayers. The Mark Twain forum (TWAIN-L) is at listserv@yorku.ca, and a mailing list for bizarre, disturbing, and offensive short stories (WEIRD-L) is at listserv@brownvm.brown.edu.
For Stephen King, check out http://www.wco.com/~pace/king.html. Usenet has alt.fan.holmes, and there is a "Sherlockian Connection" Web page with many links at http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/~lmoskowi/holmes.html.
The Internet Poetry Archive is available through the World Wide Web. The URL is http://sunsite.unc.edu/dykki/poetry/. It brings selected poems from several contemporary poets in different languages, including text, photo of poet, voice of poet reading the poem, select bibliography, and brief biographical note.
If you are into Very Rare Books, visit the Vatican Library, one of the world's oldest and most tightly restricted libraries. Founded in the mid- 1400s, the library houses over 150,000 manuscripts and a million printed books, including 80,000 books published during the first fifty years of the printing press.
Digital images of several full printed volumes, manuscripts, and artworks are gradually being made available through the Internet. 200 of its most precious manuscripts, books, and maps -- many of which played a key role in the humanist recovery of the classical heritage of Greece and Rome, is available at http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/vatican/toc.html.
If quite impossible to locate a given book, try EXLIBRIS, the Rare Books and Special Collections Forum at listproc@library.berkeley.edu. At http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/exlibris/, you can browse the forum's archived messages by month.
The Bibliophile Mailing List is for collectors and sellers of old, rare, scarce, and/or out-of-print books. It is a forum for buying, selling, and trading books. Subscribe by email to biblio-request@smartlink.net with the word SUBSCRIBE in the body of your mail, or do it from their Web site: http://www.auldbooks.com/biblio/index.html
On Usenet, they have alt.books.reviews, k12.library, alt.books.technical, rec.arts.books, and more.
You needed strong muscles to read the earliest books. In ancient Babylonia and Assyria, books consisted of numbered collections of rectangular clay tablets. They were inscribed with cuneifom and packaged in a labeled container. Taking a book from the shelf and carrying it to a reading table required the help of several assistants.
Today, you'll find full electronic versions of books on the World Wide Web and in other types of Internet archives.
The first issue (version 1.0) of this virtual book is one example. You can find it in the archives of Project Gutenberg, whose goal is to develop a library of 10,000 public domain electronic texts by the year 2000. You can retrieve it to your disk for later reading, or read it with your Web browser.
Project Gutenberg is at http://promo.net/pg/. The offerings include The Complete Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, Aesop's Fables, The Unabridged Works of Shakespeare, The Love Teachings of Kama Sutra, Tarzan, The Oedipus Trilogy (Sophocles), Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee, Frankenstein, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Holy Bible, Peter Pan, The Holy Koran, Roget's Thesaurus (1911), Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, and The World Factbook (CIA).
The Electronic Text Center (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/) offers a collection of thousands of English, French, German, Japanese, and Latin texts.
The Alex Catalog of full-text Electronic Texts gives pointers to more offerings (at http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/alex-index.html). The catalogue is divided into Search the catalog, Browse the catalog (by author, date, host, language, subject, or title), and Information about cataloging Internet resources.
On the Internet, there are a rapidly growing number of library online public-access catalogs (OPACs) from all over the world. Some provide users with access to additional resources, such as periodical indexes of specialized databases. More than 270 library catalogs are online (1992).
An up-to-date directory of libraries that are interactively accessible through Internet can be had at
gopher://libgopher.cis.yale.edu:7000/11/Libraries
The CASLIN Czech and Slovak Library Information Network is at telnet://beta.nkp.cz. Login: aluser . Use your Internet address as password. It contains over 30.000 sample records of Czech books from between 1983 and 1993 (1994). The code used for national characters is ISO 8859-2 (also called ISO Latin-2).
For Chinese books in Chinese (and in English language), check the China International Book Trading Corporation at http://www.cibtc.co.cn/.
Non-Chinese speaking people will probably classify Chinese poems as 'rare'. Many of them are impossible to read, unless your computer can handle the special characters, and you know their meaning. Interested? Subscribe to CHPOEM-L (listserv@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu). Be prepared to use your Big5 and GuoBiao utilities.
OneLook Dictionaries, The Faster Finder (http://www.onelook.com/), lets you search words in several dictionaries and glossaries in one operation. By August 1998, it had 1,795,818 words in 289 dictionaries indexed. A search for "backbone" returned definitions in six specialized dictionaries.
Your search may be limited to specific dictionaries/glossaries sorted in groups like Computer/Internet, Science, Medical, Technological, Business, Sports, Religion, Acronym, and General Dictionaries.
The Research Institute for the Humanities in Hong Kong offers extensive links to reference works, dictionaries and thesauri in many languages at http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Ref.html#dt . Their offerings include Chinese, Dutch, English, Esperanto, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Norwegian, Qur'anic Arabic, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Welch dictionaries; Dictionary of Acronyms; Quotations; Abbreviations for International Organizations; History-related reference works; Philosophy-related reference; Computer-related reference; White & Yellow Pages; Maps; Encyclopaedias.
The Places for THINKers web (http://think.ucdavis.edu/central/) has links to sources like Webster's Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and FAQs about Copyright. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations can also be searched at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,150425,00.html, Webster's at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150275,0200.html, and Roget's Thesaurus at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150331,0200.html.
I wanted quotes for a speech for my wife's birthday, and entered "wife". Here are two examples of what I found in Bartlett's:
Euripides. 484-406 B. C.
... Man's best possession is a sympathetic wife.
Plutarch. 46 (?)-120 (?) A. D.
... Pittacus said, "Every one of you hath his particular plague, and
my wife is mine; and he is very happy who hath this only."
At Search.Com, you can also search the Complete Works of William Shakespeare (at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150299,0200.html), the Koran (at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150302,0200.html), The Bible at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150304,0200.html, and The World Wide Web Acronym and Abbreviation Server (at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150427,0200.html).
Try http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/HTML/Dictionaries.html for more dictionaries. Also, take a look at the Dictionaries and Encyclopedias page at http://www.crl.com/~jderouen/encyc.html. It also has links to Esoteric Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, Technical English dictionaries, and some resources in other languages.
Research-It! (http://www.iTools.com/research-it/research-it.html) has free searching of dictionaries, thesauri, language translators, acronyms, quotations, maps, phone numbers, postal information, package tracking, financial info and more.
The real Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases can be found at http://www.thesaurus.com/.
At the Phrase Finder page (http://www.shu.ac.uk/web-admin/phrases/), type in a word to get a list of phrases related -in some way- to that word. The database includes: Lines from Shakespeare (or phrases related to the word Shakespeare), Quotations (or phrases related to the word quotation), and One-liner jokes.
Searching and reading well-known encyclopedias like Grolier's Academic American in full text costs money. Some services, like CompuServe and Dow Jones Interactive, give you access at discount prices.
Telnet to CompuServe (telnet://compuserve.com) to browse The American Heritage Dictionary. This example is from one of my trips:
THE AMERICAN HERITAGE
DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Third Edition
Copyright 1992
Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
1 Introduction
2 Users Guide
3 Search Dictionary
!3
Search term: grassroot
grassroots
========================================
grass*roots
plural noun (used with a sing. or pl. verb)
(1) People or society at a local level rather than at the center of major
political activity. Often used with the. (2) The groundwork or source of
something.
noun attributive.
(1) Often used to modify another noun: a grassroots movement; a grassroots
constituency.
On the Internet, these works are often only available for closed groups, or for those willing to pay. One exception is The Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. More than 17,000 articles from their Third Edition are searchable online for free at http://encyclopedia.com/. (Related links turn the encyclopeida into a subject-oriented front-end to the fee-based Electronic Library.)
The Encyclopaedia Britannica is available for a fee. The subscription form is available through WWW on http://www.eb.com. Webster is at http://www.m-w.com/ offering free searches in its dictionary, thesaurus, medical dictionary, and more. You can search Webster by email to jfesler@netcom.com using the following type of command in the subject line:
#webster [word to search for]
Example: Putting "#webster parenthood" in the subject line gave:
par.ent.hood \'par-*nt-.hu.d, 'per-\ n : the position, function, or
standing of a parent
For some time, though, the "information-for-free" enthusiasts have been working on an alternative, the Internet Encyclopedia, or Interpedia. The idea is for volunteers to write cooperatively the new encyclopedia, put it in the public domain, and make it available on the Internet.
Unlike any printed encyclopedia, the Interpedia could be kept completely up-to-date. It could include hypertext links to discussions, and perhaps evolve into a general interface to all resources and activities on the Internet.
For more information, subscribe to the Interpedia mailing list by sending a message to interpedia-request@telerama.lm.com. The body of your message must contain the word 'subscribe' and your e-mail address, as follows: subscribe your_username@your.host.domain