It has been said that no matter how obscure the information, or perverse the fetish, it can be found on the World Wide Web. The difficult bit comes in finding what you want among the millions of web-pages out in cyberspace, and here’s where we help you out.

The numerous search-engines are divided into indexes – which uses automated ‘bots’ to seek out and index web-pages, directories – which groups web pages neatly into categories, similar to the Yellow Pages, and databases, which, as its name suggests, does not so much search the net for you as collect information on a particular subject.

If the information you are seeking falls into one topic; fashion or movies, for example, your best bet is to use a directory, of which Yahoo! is the most popular. If you’re looking for a specific piece of information – ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ – it is best to try an index.

While web-directories do not cover the entire World Wide Web, if you expect a lot of pages to be devoted to your interest, an index will turn up too many pages to be of use. As many of these pages will be within a site itself, a directory serves better by pointing you directly to the main page of a site.

Databases tend to provide less detailed information than a devoted web site, but usually has the sum of human knowledge in its banks, at least, within the range of its chosen subject. For example, the Internet Movie Database can tell you who directed any movie ever made, but if you want to know more juicy details, or check if there are themes or screen-savers for your movie, use a directory and visit a devoted site. The ‘sum of human knowledge’ bit is not an exaggeration, most databases allow surfers to input additional information to their substantial banks. Project Gutenberg actually has etexts of most books in the public domain, including the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible.

Using A Search Engine

In spite of the fact that Search Engines use a ranking system to sort out the sites that are searched for, giving you the most relevant links on the top of the results page, if you would rather not surf through a bunch of banal pages with pictures of someone’s dog, it helps to know some effective searching techniques. The following work on most Search Engines:

Always use lowercase text (small letters) when searching. If you use upper case, the engine will do a case-sensitive search. Hence, a search for ‘Polish’ will only turn up pages with the word ‘Polish’, while a search for ‘polish’ will return pages with the words ‘Polish’, ‘POLISH’, even ‘PoLiSh’. Also, remember that typos and differing ways of writing occur; avoid including words like ‘we’re’ or ‘we are’, and always use the singular of a word. If a specific number in involved, like the forth edition of a book, you may have to repeat the search using numerals ‘4’ and the number itself ‘fourth’, maybe a third time using roman numerals ‘IV’.

If you are looking for anything to do with words, like lyrics for a song or a quotation, enclose your search line in "double quotation marks", marking the search as a phase. This will tell the engine that you are searching for these words together, instead of individually, which is the generally useless default.

You can include or exclude certain words, by putting a plus ‘+’ or a minus ‘-’ before the word. Say, in my search for the number of angels I want to invite to my ballroom pin dance party, I would search for ‘angel +dance +pin’. And if the search turns up a bunch of pages by ‘DarkAngel & Her Bondage Dance Club’, I would add a ‘-bondage’ to the search string and try again.

By typing an asterisk ‘*’ before or after a word, you can search for different variants of the word. A search for ‘po*’ will turn up sites with ‘poems’, ‘poetry’ and teletubbies.

And if you still can’t find what you’re looking for, maybe you should consider less perverse fetishes. By the way, between one and an infinity of angels can dance on the head of a pin, so says the internet.