There are a number of ways to find information on the web - A great overview is "Guiding Lights" by Ron Conte in the magazine Internet World May 1996. Back issues of the magazine are on line.
Link to the Internet World article "Guiding Lights"
Search engines are systems that allow you to enter a word or phrase
and they identify web sites that contain the term(s) .. some look
for contexts, that is not the exact word but related ones. The
good news with these is that you will find more information than
you thought was possible, the bad news is that, unless you focus
your search, you may find that you get a lot of junk as well as
information. You need to be able to focus your searching. Gus
Venditto has a good review of the various search engines in an
article in Internet World in May 1996. Link to the Internet World article on search engines.
The different pages do slightly different things so it may be
useful to use more than one. Also some of the pages do well when
you search for one term but may find pages that are not focused
- lots of trash! Others have "advanced searching."
One of the most difficult problems in using the search engines is to find what you want but eliminate what you don't. Be sure to check out the "Help" (click to see material from Alta Vista's basic help) or "Search Tips" or "Suggested Search Methods" - all the sits have these. When you conduct the search there is usually the "basic" and "advanced" search options. In most of the engines a "basic" search is easy to do but may lead to unnecessarily large unwanted answers. For example, using the terms - archaic sites - would find web pages with that had the word archaic OR the word sites somewhere on the page. Trying the search on Alta Vista returned more than 2,000 "hits.' Strangely enough the first was about an archaic archaeological site but the rest were all over the map. In Alta Vista you can put a "+" before the words, which means that both words must be present on the page. This reduced the results but still found a lot of pages to the "Archaic Factory's Free Web Page site…"
This is the mother of all web search sites. It has the most web pages indexed, is really fast and usually finds pages of interest.
Excite doesn't have as many pages but is user friendly and has a nice context search
Lycos includes web pages but also indexes other types of files ont he web including images and other multimedia.
Infoseek is fast but not as extensive as Alta Vista
Open Text has a number of power searching tools and considers all words on a page.
Directories organize web sites into groups of similar sites. They are useful since you can look at a large number of pages that share features that you may be interested in and they may lead you to sites that you would not otherwise find. The bad news is that they are not as comprehensive and that you are relying on another person to organize things. If they do a good job its great - otherwise.
The largest of these types of sites and most popular.
This site has a nice feature in that you can restrict your search to only those sites that have been visited by the reviewers and assessed. The bad news is that this is only a fraction of al the sites.
This site focuses on business web pages.
The WWW Virtual Library is an attempt to create a global virtual library. The "main catalogue" is here with links to other subject catalogues maintained on other sites. Checkout the archaeology virtual library or the anthropology virtual library links as examples. Most of the libraries are labors of love by individuals. They can be super or they can be burned-out.
These sites list web pages based on their newness - they're good if you want to find out what is most current.
Starting Point www.stpt.com/new.html
NCSA Whats new - www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/whats-new.html
This was the original home for all the new stuff. It stopped listing new sites in May 1996 but still can be a valuable source
Netscapes Whats New www.netscape.com/escapes/whats_new.html
Web crawler's whats new - webcrawler.com/select/nunu.new.html
Lots of e-mail addresses. Find old flames, new professors, whatever. In addition to finding e-mail addresses Four 11 also can search for phone numbers!
There is a specialized e-mail directory for anthropologists as well. It can be accessed at wings.buffalo.edu/academic/department/anthropology/weda/
Go to the World Wide E-mail Directort of Anthropologists
News groups can be great sources of information but the "noise" to "signal" rati can be very low. These search engines can help you winnow the materials.
Many of the other engines also have News Group options. An excellent one is Alta Vista