The Internet is HUGE...and getting bigger every minute. Even before the World Wide Web, people realized that some type of cataloging was necessary in order to find all the information. The WAIS database was created to document Internet information in various areas. WAIS was(is) a very powerful text searching tool. It has lost some of its usefulness, however, with the explosion of the World Wide Web.

Cataloging the World Wide Web is a daunting task. Take a look at the comparison chart. You can see that each of the search engines catalog MILLIONS of PAGES each day. Even with that, the search engine databases are only updated every few months.

The program(s) used to search the Web are called robots or spiders. The both work their magic in similar ways. These programs look at the database and check to see if anything has changed on the existing sites. They also look for new links and check to see if they have been cataloged. As new links are reported back to the search engine, these are added to the list to be cataloged. You can submit your URL to a search engine, or all of them, so the robot will visit your site.

Robots and spiders do not look at the whole site, in most cases. Pages can be protected from robots and spiders also, preventing them from indexing certain areas. Entire sites can also be protected.

Search engines store their information in a database. This database is available through a query, or question, that runs a search to find the information requested. The basic query could be a word or phrase, but this might find several thousands or millions of 'hits' (results sent back from the query). Each search engine uses a core logic for the queries. This is based on the Boolean logic operators AND, OR and NOT.

Many of the search databases have begun cataloging their information by subjects. These are often known as directories. In a directory, you have a list of subjects and you can search or browse the subject list for infromation. This is similar to the way library books are cataloged.

Other search engines are specific to certain areas or types of documents. Recently, a few search engines have started including Usenet newsgroups in the database, so documents and messages there can be accessed. Some search engines have begun cataloging online newspapers and magazines.

Finding software available on the Internet has never been easier. Several search engines have special sites, which catalogue the directories of the large shareware and freeware sites. Most of these FTP sites also have their own online software searches.

You can also find people and businesses on the Internet. These directories, sometimes referred to as white or yellow pages, will give you the name and sometimes address, phone, email and even a map to the person or business. Most of these are only accurate for people or businesses who have signed on to the service. Others have scoured information from other sources and added it to their database.

Good luck and happy searching.

AND. Joining search terms with the AND operator tells Lycos Pro that you want to find documents containing each term. (For example, Larry AND Curly AND Moe) This is similar to selecting "All the

Words" in the drop-down menu. But, as you'll see below, AND can be used in conjunction with other operators for more powerful searching.

OR. Use OR when any of the search terms joined by the operator should appear in the results. This is similar to selecting Any of the Words in the drop-down menu. (For example, Chico OR Zeppo.) Like AND, OR can be used as a building block of more-complex Boolean expressions.

NOT. Use the NOT operator to exclude unwanted documents when your search uses a term commonly found in connection with an unrelated topic. For example, if you're not in the mood for laughs, you can improve a search for information on the author of The Communist Manifesto by entering Marx NOT Brothers.

Use the plus sign (+) in front of a search term if you require it to be in your search results documents. Use the minus sign (-) before terms to weed out webpages that contain those words. The two operators work much like AND and NOT. However, they can make more-complex expressions easier to read -- and certainly easier to type. For example, Larry OR Curly +Moe +Shemp indicates that results should always mention Moe and Shemp, but would not have to name both Larry and Curly. The expression Panama AND Hat -Canal will quickly get you past all the information on the Panamanian waterway and straight to documents mentioning the headgear.

As you explore the Web, your queries won't always be based on single words. Lycos Pro allows you to work with groups of words and phrases. And Lycos search operators can be used to evaluate such composite terms just as they can individual words. Here's what you can do:

Parenthesis ( ) (or these symbols: [ ] or < > or { }). Parentheses are used to group and combine search terms. For example, you can dig up information on one or two famed Hollywood duos with this query: (Fred AND Ginger) OR (Roy AND Trigger) .

Quotation Marks " ". Put quotation marks around a group of words and you've got a phrase. This is like selecting The Exact Phrase in the drop-down menu. However, using quoted phrases in conjunction with other Boolean operators offers additional flexibility. Try "Smashing Pumpkins" AND Simpsons to find references to the band's incarnation as cartoon characters alongside Homer and Bart.

Frequently, the placement of words within a document reveals their relevancy to one another. Lycos Pro offers four operators to help define those relationships: ADJ (meaning adjacent), NEAR, FAR and BEFORE.

ADJ. Use the ADJ operator if you want to find documents in which the terms appear right next to each other, in any order. Sports fans might search for car ADJ race knowing that such a query will match car race and race car.

NEAR. When you use NEAR, the terms must appear within 25 words of each other in the results documents. So, searching for "Kevin Bacon" NEAR game will find webpages referencing a popular trivial pastime without having to get so exclusive as "Kevin Bacon game". (For example, that NEAR query would find a match in this sentence: "Here's a neat game based on the movies of Kevin Bacon and his co-stars.")

FAR. You can probably guess that FAR is the opposite of NEAR. When you use FAR, Lycos will find documents in which the search terms appear 25 words or more apart in at least one instance. Since it doesn't preclude the possibility that the terms may also appear closer together on the same page, FAR is most useful when used in conjunction with other expressions. For example, you can search for Apple FAR Pie NOT "Apple Pie" and find pages containing both words but not apple pie.

BEFORE. BEFORE works like the familiar AND, the only difference being that the terms must appear in the order you specify, but they can be any distance apart in the same document. If you're a little shaky on the spelling of Gettysburg, you can still track down the text of former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln's famous address in that town by searching this way: fourscore BEFORE liberty.

Of the operators that reveal the relationship between terms by evaluating their positions in a document, only BEFORE is concerned with the order in which they appear. But you can add BEFORE's ordering capabilities to ADJ, NEAR and FAR by prepending those operators with the letter "O" -- for ordered. So, race OADJ car will match only race car and not car race. (Note that this would not exclude documents containing the phrase car race if they also contained the phrase you seek.) Similarly, ONEAR and OFAR work like their NEAR/FAR cousins but result in matches only when search terms appear in the same order you type them.

By default, the NEAR and FAR operators use a word count of 25 to ensure that search terms appear the proper distance from one another. You can modify this behavior by appending a slash ("/") to either operator, followed by some number you choose as the maximum or minimum word count between search terms in the results documents.

For example, to be more particular with a NEAR query, you might search like this: 1996 NEAR/5 "Oscar nominees".

While, by default, ADJ finds matches only when search terms are found side by side in Web documents, you can use the above technique to coax ADJ into specifying an exact word count between terms. For example: bacon ADJ/2 eggs would match bacon and eggs as well as eggs and bacon, or eggs with bacon.

Specifying word counts works for OADJ, ONEAR and OFAR just as it does for ADJ, NEAR and FAR.

In addition to the meta words listed above, there are also three date meta words that allow you to conduct focused searches specifying a range of dates. These are:

Currently, these date meta words will only function correctly if they are used as a single term within a Boolean clause, without any pluses or minuses. So (+space -Nasa) AND within:8/months will work, however, +space -Nasa +within:3/months will not.