The importance of subsidiarity and
'micro-searching' for seekers
Webrings, homepages clusters, maillists, messageboards, national engines, usenet
So-called "local" search engines are extremely
important to fetch info. Freepages providers, counters,
stats applications and all other finalized search engines...
that you can use at leisure...
for fun, searching purposes, combing
and/or knowledge profit.
There's noway I can give you in the short time of my slot a complete description of
the huge plethora of tools available.
Usenet
Among the different 'local' areas of the web,
usenet is without any doubt extremely important for searchers,
and Dejanews (one of the few remaining usenet repositories)
has proved
to be an unconturnable service for seekers.
To peruse usenet, you must access a news server, which
is nothing else than a computer system which provides shared
storage for Usenet articles. Usenet must use "shared storage"
because its total volume is HUGE. Instead of requiring each reader
to obtain and store 200,000 articles in 2 GBytes per day, the
articles can be kept in a central location and thus can
be "shared" by many readers.
Be aware of some typical usenet "quirks":
Each server has ONLY A PART of the total articles.
Your news reader can only display articles which are present
on the news server you access. If an article is not present
on the server, it is because either that article has never arrived
at your server, or it has been cancelled,
or else it has expired.
Because there is a limited amount of storage on a local news server,
articles "must" expire. But fortunately, the accumulated body of information
of Usenet is not lost: There are a number of WWW sites which archive and
index Usenet articles. Thus you can retrieve posts which have expired
(or perhaps had not even arrived) at your local news server.
Instead of asking a question in a news group, you can use the Usenet
archives to retrieve articles which discussed your question long ago.
By searching first and posting questions only if you find no answers,
everyone will be much happier (this is valid for messageboards as
well, btw :-)
Searching usenet first you will get an answer faster. You don't have to
wait for your message to reach the far corners of the world.
You don't have to rely on someone nice enough to write a reply.
Perhaps those in the know aren't listening right now, even if
they answered the same question in depth in the past.
Searching offers an added advantage: you will also find the groups
which have an interest in your topic. Do not underestimate it. So
if you cannot find the answer in the archived messages, you will
have a good starting place to ask questions.
A final word of WARNING: there are a series of anonymity
concerns that you should consider when posting on usenet.
You may consider visiting sites with a section
giving advices about anonymity, like mine :-)
Yet the above search string gives you all spammers in extenso
and a lot of side-banners and other commercial crap. Therefore it would be a good idea
to use
the following one instead to avoid some of the advertisements,
adding =dnc after the main part of the url: http://www.deja.com/=dnc/qs.xp?OP=dnquery.xp&ST=MS&DBS=2&QRY=%22how+to+search%22
Microsearching (local searching) means taking advantage of a plethora of tools that
the web offers, from the specific search engines that most homepages clusters have, to
the webrings search engines, the maillists search engines and the 'local' search engines like
AOL and hitbox. Public 'free' counters are for instance a very useful resources when searching
specific material, especially if they are categorized by the users themselves, like hitbox.
Micro/local searching is very valuable in many fields: try your own "hobbyes"
searches on any personal homepage cluster à la Geocities or xoom (or fortunecity, or thousand other
"free" page providers), compare with the results you would get through the main search engines
and
you'll immediately understand what I mean.
Regional search engines
Regional search engines are even more important in a more and more international web.
Take note that among the future www developments cross language information
retrieval, or CLIR (which 'grossomodo' means querying in one language
documents in many languages and implies a lot of semanthic algos) will
become more and more important.
The searching value of "Subsidiarity" (a term which per se is
nothing else than a synonym for
feudalisation in the European Union's jargon) is extremely high.
So-called "regional" search engines are incredibly important for fetching 'less biased'
info. As you may expect, russian, chinese, indian, japanese and 'you-name-them' collections of datas
have a completely different 'cut' vis-à-vis the stuff you can find
in the euroamerican world. (This is of course true for all sort of data:
files, images, sounds, films, software...
the well-known motto being "always go ftp-fishing far from the copyright-obsessed
euroamericans). Anyway there are huge differences (in quality, 'cut' and bias)
between 'european' and 'american'
data colections as well.
The value of critical information is increasing,
and such information is now - for the first time in the history of
our race - available for everybody (once he knows how to search: unfortunately
the volume of commercial rubbish you'll have to wade through is
increasing exponentially).
The web is an Ocean of knowledge...
about two centimeters deep.
Finding rare snippets of information among tons of crap is getting more and more difficoult
because on a more and more 'commercial' web you are compelled to wade through
a lot of noise to get to the signal. Most search engines
DO NOT index the most interesting parts
of the web: they index commercial over educational sites,
'popular' sites (read sites loved by the zombies) over relatively
unknown sites and US sites over European sites... Well you should at least try to
compensate this last disadvantage using search engines located outside the States.
Do not underestimate the task of a seeker, though:
even mastering the 'subsidiariety searching' lore,
and knowing some elementary
microsearching techniques
is not enough to be a good seeker: in order to
search effectively you must also know some more 'broad'
'reversing techniques', else you'll never be able to build your
own bots.
