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Electronic commerce
Often referred to as simply e-commerce, business that is
conducted over the Internet using any of the applications
that rely on the Internet, such as e-mail, instant
messaging, shopping carts, Web services, UDDI, FTP, and
EDI, among others. Electronic commerce can be between two
businesses transmitting funds, goods, services and/or data
or between a business and a customer.
Internet Tips
A global network connecting millions of computers. More
than 100 countries are linked into exchanges of data, news
and opinions.
Unlike online services, which are centrally controlled, the
Internet is decentralized by design. Each Internet
computer, called a host, is independent. Its operators can
choose which Internet services to use and which local
services to make available to the global Internet
community. Remarkably, this anarchy by design works
exceedingly well.
General Search Engine Tips
Generally, search statements are not case sensitive.
Two-word searches are treated as an exact phrase. In the
case of longer phrases, they are searched in proximity.
Quotation marks should be used to search for exact phrases.
During browsing, a lot of time is wasted looking for
something. This is a gross waste of time that can be
prevented. But here are six ways to cut down on the time
you spend looking for something (Elliot, 2005). Continue
Reading General Search Engine Tips...
Introductions to Search Engines
Search engines are programs on the internet that help users
to search for files and information. The World Wide Web has
millions of web pages with a voluminous amount of
information. Search engines aid the user to locate
information by searching the internet for pages and then
data. Examples of popular search engines include Google,
MSN, Infoseek, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, and others. Most
search engines find files that contain a key word or words
typed in by the user. Some search engines specialize in a
subject area or type of file. Others, called meta-search
engines, query a number of regular search engines and
collect the best results. Continue Reading Introduction to
Search Engines
E-mails:
Check E-mail Yahoo! Mail ? AOL Mail ? MSN Hotmail ? Gmail ?
AIM ?
Search Engines
Search the best of the Web all from one place — search,
news, discussion, business information and research Web
sites. Find your answers faster by customizing your search
and searching only the sites that best fit your research.
Save your search preferences and your best searches for
your next research project.
Access Direct Top Search Engine Links on Your Homepage,
Including:
*
Yahoo.com About, Tips
* MSN.com About, Tips
* Google.com About, Tips
* Ask.com About, Tips
* Teoma.com About, Tips
* MySpace.com
* eBay.com
* Amazon.com
* YouTube.com
* CraigsList.com
* AOL.com
* Weather.com
* MapQuest.com
About Yahoo!
by OfficialSearchList.org Staff · Yahoo! Homepage
· A-Z Yahoo! Services
Launched in 1994, Yahoo is the web's oldest "directory," a
place where human editors organize web sites into
categories. However, in October 2002, Yahoo made a giant
shift to crawler-based listings for its main results. These
came from Google until February 2004. Now, Yahoo uses its
own search technology. Yahoo! is one of the best known and
most popular Internet portals. Yahoo is a search engine,
subject directory, and web portal. Yahoo provides good
search results powered by their own search engine database,
and includes cached copies of search results, much like
Google. It was originally a directory on various subjects
and hence it continues to hold substantial content in its
directory that can be searched directly or browsed by
categories. It's also possible to do a pure search of just
the human-compiled Yahoo Directory, which is how the old or
"classic" Yahoo used to work. To do this, the user must
search from the Yahoo Directory home page, as opposed to
the regular Yahoo.com home page. Yahoo! provide essential
consumer services to increase the value of the overall
online user experience on Yahoo!. These services include:
*
Internet content from over 2000 top-of-the-industry
providers in areas such as news, travel, sports, games, and
weather
*
Commerce services such as shopping, auctions, finance, and
classifieds that enable merchants, enterprises and
individuals to find their audience and complete
transactions efficiently on a worldwide basis
*
Communications services such as Mail, Messenger, Photos,
Greetings, Clubs, and Groups which make communicating on
the Internet, from a PC or wireless device, easier than
ever
*
Yahoo! Everywhere provides consumers with seamless mobile
access to essential, personalized, local and timely
information across a multitude of devices including
wireless phones, two-way pagers and Personal Digital
Assistants (PDAs).
These services make Yahoo! very special to internet users.
The main weaknesses of this site are that there is a heavy
commercial emphasis, some content is dated and the search
results try to keep the users on Yahoo! Properties. Yahoo!
uses Boolean AND by default, sometimes. For others searches
it may do an OR. It uses what it calls its "intelligent
default," but Yahoo! does not document exactly how that
works. So, the results can vary. Yahoo! does not support
Boolean operators or nested searching. It does support use
of the + to require a term and a - to exclude hits with
that term. Phrase searching is available by using double
quotes around a phrase. To truncate a search term of one to
five characters, the asterisk may be used. Yahoo! has no
case sensitive searching. By using the advanced search
option, the user can limit to just Yahoo! directory
categories or Yahoo! directory sites. One can also limit to
entries added within one of the following specified periods
of time: Anytime, 3 months. 6 months and 1 year. Like
Google, some common words are ignored by Yahoo!
Yahoo! Search Tips
Some search tips that can be followed which using Yahoo!
are: Be concise. As Yahoo’s results are both from a human
edited directory and its own search engine, the results may
not be as targeted as you might like them to be. Narrowing
down your search to a few specific keywords will help. It
is best to use Yahoo keywords. The user can use field
searching in Yahoo's Advanced Search section.
MSN Search.
by OfficialSearchList.org Staff · MSN Homepage
· A-Z MSN Services
MSN Search is the search engine for the MSN portal site. It
has a large unique database, query building 'search
builder' and Boolean searching. It has cached copies of Web
pages including date cached, and automatic local search
options.
Weakness: The main weaknesses of MSN search are its
inconsistent availability of truncation and no title,
truncation and stemming. Moreover, multiple search terms
are processed as an AND operation by default. MSN Search
offers full Boolean searching, although the AND is not
needed since it is the default operation. MSN Search
supports Boolean operators AND (or the ampersand symbol &),
OR (or the pipe symbol |), and NOT. Either AND NOT or NOT
can be used. Operators must be in upper case unless symbols
are used. Searching can be nested using parentheses. MSN
Search can also use - for NOT, but there must be no space
between the - and the query term (Notess, 2005). The plus
symbol + seems to make no difference unless used in front
of a stop word. The Search Builder includes options for has
a drop down menu choice for All of these Term, Any of these
Terms, and None of these Terms. Phrase searching can be
designated by double quotes "" around a search phrase.
There is also an "exact phrase" option in the Search
Builder under Search Terms. This search engine Invokes the
language limit when followed by the two letter language
code. It also specifies a country or region using two
character country or region codes. The Search Builder makes
use of a number of limit options.
Searches can be limited by location/domain or can exclude a
specific domain. MSN can limit by country and/or region. It
can limit results specific file types: HTML, PDF,
PowerPoint, Word, or Excel. Default includes all these file
types. There are 12 language limits as of March 2005:
Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian,
Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
There is a Safe Search limit for excluding sexually
explicit content. By default, it is automatically set to
exclude sexually explicit images but not text. MSN will
search single stop words like 'the' or 'an', and it will
search them within a "phrase search." However, it will
ignore stop words if there are other non-stop-word terms
unless a + is put in front of the stop word. Results are
sorted by relevance. The display of results includes the
title, a brief keyword-in-context (KWIC) display, the URL,
and a link to the cached copy of the page. A date is
sometimes displayed to the right of the cache link when
that page has been updated in the MSN database recently.
MSN Search displays 10 records at a time, by default. MSN
Search automatically tries to identify a user's location
for the local search. The location can also be changed by
the user through the "settings" link. Then, clicking the
"Near Me" button next to the "Search" button runs a local
search based on the default location.
The new MSN Search makes it easier and faster to find just
what the user wants (Nelson, 2006). With results from MSN
Music, MSN Encarta® and even the user's own desktop, MSN
Search gives the user all the tools he needs to make the
most of his time. The MSN Search Toolbar with Windows
Desktop Search is a collection of toolbars designed to help
the user more efficiently search the Web and the computer
from within Microsoft Internet Explorer or Windows
Explorer, the Windows taskbar, and Microsoft Outlook. The
suite also features an automatic form fill manager, a
pop-up Blocker for preventing pop-up ads from appearing,
and a highlight feature that highlights search results for
you. These make it special. MSN's core weakness is it has
no audience. It's a catch 22 for MSN, it needs the audience
to win the advertisers to drive its system forwards. There
is no known truncation, stemming, or wild card word in a
phrase capabilities exist. MSN Search has no case sensitive
searching. MSN Search has several field searching
capabilities, but it does not have a title search, one of
the most common options elsewhere. These are its
weaknesses. There are two interesting things to note about
MSN search engine. If there is a keyword rich paragraph
near the top of the page, either in the first or second
paragraph, then the page “may” do well in search requests
for the keywords in that paragraph. MSN search leads to
pages that have links to other sites with those keywords in
the clickable text (Nelson, 2006). Some search tips in
using MSN search are: Words can be prefixed with = to turn
them into commands, which are then stored in history for
one-click recall. The users should Web Type one or more
search terms, and then click Search. The most relevant
content is frequently location specific. When the user is
looking for local events, places, and services on the Web,
he must type the location as part of his search term, and
then click the Local text link to start the search. MSN
Search can be used to search for information in over 35
different languages.. One must avail of the Search
Worldwide page to learn more about country/region and
language search options. Search Builder option must be used
to create complex searches by combining or excluding terms,
by selecting domains, countries, or regions, or by
selecting the language to perform your search. The user can
Desktop Type the search terms into the search box, and then
click Desktop to find documents in one's own computer as
well as e-mail in Microsoft Office Outlook.
About Google
Google, according to its co-founder Larry Page is something
that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back
exactly what you want." Google is a search engine that has
constantly sought innovation and improvisation. As a
result, Google developed its own serving infrastructure and
breakthrough PageRank™ technology that changed the way
searches are conducted. Google was the first general search
engine that provides access to pages at the time they were
indexed, designated as "cached" pages. Google is also the
only search engine that searches for some characters. As of
Sept. 2003, it would search for the ampersand & and the
underscore _ characters by themselves or as part of a
character string (Notess, 2004). Google handles numbers in
some special ways and can search for a range of numbers.
When it searches for numbers, it also finds numbers with
and without commas. Number searches and number range
searches can be combined with other terms and can be
included in phrase searching. A number range search, like
most other Google searches, will also find pages that do
not contain the number but are linked from other pages that
contain the number in the linking anchor text.”
Most search engines utilized a handful of large servers
that often slowed under peak loads for the search
operations. Google employed linked PCs to quickly find each
query's answer. The innovation paid off in faster response
times, greater scalability and lower costs. The software
behind Google's search technology conducts a series of
simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a
second (Nystedt, 2006). Google uses PageRank™ to examine
the entire link structure of the web and determine which
pages are most important. It then conducts
hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are
relevant to the specific search being conducted. By
combining overall importance and query-specific relevance,
Google is able to put the most relevant and reliable
results first. Google's search engine also analyzes page
content in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of
each word. The speed with which the results are returned is
very impressive. Though a basic Google search answers most
questions, it is possible to customize everything from the
language of the interface to the format of the pages Google
returns as results (Notess, 2004). Users can search for
images, multiple file types, pages in Czech or Turkish,
posts to Usenet, phone numbers, airline flight info or
categories in the Open Directory. By using the preferences
page, users can also select the number of results returned
and filter out adult content. There's much more to what
Google offers, from an amazing spell checker to tools for
translating web pages from one language to another or from
HTML to a format readable by most mobile devices. To use
Google's built-in calculator function, one can simply enter
the calculation into the search box. These attributes make
Google very special.
There are a few limitations in Google. There are limited
search features: no nesting, no truncation, does not
support full Boolean. Link searches must be exact and are
incomplete. Only indexes first 101 KB of a Web page and
about 120 KB of PDF. Google's top results are claimed to be
heavily skewed toward shopping sites, if the user is
looking for something that is sold online. Multiple search
terms are processed as an AND operation by default. Phrase
matches are ranked higher. It does not yet support the AND
operator, NOT operator, or full Boolean searching with the
ability to nest operators. Google has no case sensitive
searching. Google has language, domain, date, file type,
and adult content limits. The date limit, added in July
2001, has only three options are available: Past 3 Months,
Past 6 Months, or Past Year. Google ignores frequent words.
Searching on the Google is easy and simple. Choose the
right search terms. Start with the obvious. Its advisable
to use multiple search terms. There is no need to
capitalize letters or use terms such as 'and, if, or" etc.
Phrase searches are effective when the user is searching
for proper names. Use of minus sign denotes a meaning the
user wants to avoid. The "I'm feeling lucky' button takes
the user to the most relevant website Google has found for
thee query.
Google will refresh its entire index approximately every 30
days. The ht:/Dig search engine is re-indexed twice a week.
There are a variety of ways to access the Internet. Most
online services, such as America Online, offer access to
some Internet services. It is also possible to gain access
through a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP).
www
A system of Internet servers that support specially
formatted documents. The documents are formatted in a
markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
that supports links to other documents, as well as
graphics, audio, and video files. This means you can jump
from one document to another simply by clicking on hot
spots. Not all Internet servers are part of the World Wide
Web.
There are several applications called Web browsers that
make it easy to access the World Wide Web; Two of the most
popular being Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet
Explorer.
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