The Rough Guide Website Directory (Mini Rough Guides)

INTRODUCTION

FIND IT without losing your mind

Barring total deforestation of the world, it would be physically impossible to list, let alone review, every Website currently floating around the ether; in fact, this book lists less than one-tenth of one percent of all the information available on the World Wide Web. Therefore, the art of finding something pinned up on the world’s biggest scrapboard is, without doubt, the most valuable skill you can glean from your time online. If you know how to use the Net to find an answer to almost anything quickly and comprehensively, you’d have to consider yourself not only useful but pretty saleable too. Most people, including many Net veterans, simply bumble their way around. Yet it’s a remarkably basic skill to master. So read this section, then get online and start investigating. Within an hour or two you’ll be milking the Net for all it’s worth. It might turn out to be the best investment you’ll ever make!

HOW IT WORKS The Net is massive. Just the Web alone houses well over two billion pages of text, and many millions more are added daily. So you’ll need some serious help if you want to find something. Thankfully, there’s a wide selection of search tools to make the task relatively painless. The job usually entails keying your search terms into a form on a Web page and waiting a few seconds for the results.

Over the next few pages we’ll introduce you to search tools that can locate almost anything: on the Web; linked to from the Web; or archived into an online Web database, such as email addresses, phone numbers, program locations, newsgroup articles and news clippings. Of course, first it has to be put online and granted public access. So just because you can access US government servers doesn’t mean you’ll find a file on DEA Operative Presley’s whereabouts.

Peter Buckley and Duncan Clark are co-authors of the Rough Guide to PCs and the Rough Guide to the Internet, the UK's best-selling computer title, and editors of Rough Guides' music website.