Coping with Anarchy: How do I find...?

OK, there's just too much. If you have a pretty specific interest or need-to-know, how can you locate sites that might be relevant? The tool of choice at the moment seems to be AltaVista, an Internet indexing service provided by Digital Equipment Corporation. It's amazing. You can ask for occurrences of words or phrases in WWW documents, and even really odd things turn out to have occurred somewhere. I use AltaVista as a tool of first resort these days, though in 6 months something else may have supplanted it.

Try it out --just click on the link below and enter a word or (in quotes) a phrase you want to locate instances of. There are more elaborate ways to search (see 'Advanced' on the AltaVista menu), but the basic methods are remarkably powerful.

connect to AltaVista

YAHOO ('Yet Another Hierarchically Oriented Oracle') is another wonderful tool, powerful in another way: it classifies sites according to their content, and doesn't index the words they contain.

connect to YAHOO