Reading the Web listing

Some search engines return results with brief descriptions that can be helpful in determining which links to follow, such as this listing returned in AltaVista.

Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital, located in southern Connecticut, is a 944-bed tertiary care facility serving as the primary teaching hospital for the... URL: www.ynhh.org/ynhch/ynhch.html The “org.” tells you the site is sponsored by a nonprofit organization.

What those endings mean
“.gov” . . .sponsored by the federal government
“.edu” . . .university-based sites
“.org” . . .nonprofit organizations
“.com” . . .used by commercial sites
“.net” . . .an additional designation for commercial sites

The URLs of sites located outside of the U.S. include abbreviated endings for the country. For example, “.it” stands for Italy.

Searching for the perfect match
Try more than one search engine. At any given time, a search engine turns up only a small percentage of the information on the Web. And because each search engine works a little differently, each one finds information differently.

Metasearch
To search multiple indexes at the same time, try a metasearch engine such as metacrawler.com, savvysearch.com or search.com. Or, search three search engines of your choice all at once at profusion.com. Obviously, this approach would be more useful when your initial search turns up little information.