I have become more and more interested in phenomenological aspects of the Internet as a vast source of information and knowledge. I mean, there is no problem whatsoever to find something on the Web, but is it relevant and correct information?

If you search for warez you´ll get thousands of hits. Do a search for the cost of health care in India and you´ll get a couple of hundred hits. You can do a search on any chosen subject and you´ll see what I mean.

To begin with I will only make a casual reflection about searching the web. This page may be seen as a general approach on how to find information on the web.

The search engines seem to have become a tool for marketing rather than a tool for finding information. In my opinion it is really annoying to get url´s to hundreds of stores were I can buy "related" things when I do a search. This additional, and not asked for, information slow down the access time and basically makes it harder to find real information and knowledge.

Cookies
When browsing the web we all come across all those cookies when entering a site. Cookies also keeps track of every search query made through any search engine.

Tricky Mickey´s Site is hosted by a commercial web hotel and I can get a large amount of information about every visitor, using prgrammes available for free on the web. Click on the Extreme Tracking logo at the bottom of this page and find out what I know about my visitors, simply through the use of cookies on the server.

Imagine what a kind of information a professional company´s web master can collect directly from their servers and use in marketing analysis, and we who are entering a site or using the search engines, don´t even know what kind of information we´re leaving out about ourselves. That is the reason why every Internaut should have search engines and search spiders installed on the personal hard drives, instead of relying completely on the commercial search engines.

I´ve been testing a program called Go-Get-It which is a very fast and configurable search engine spider. Do a search for any given subject, image or a person; hit the search button and the spider will search the indexed pages in Altavista, Lycos, Search.com, WebCrawler and Yahoo.

Go-Get-It will retrieve the ten most accurate hits in each index and store the pages on your harddrive, then it´s easy to browse the pages offline. And there´s no waiting for the ad´s and banners to load on each page before you get the information.

Set Up A Search Engine On The Harddrive
There is no need to start at a site when you open the browser. The fastest access to the web is through a customized startpage on your own harddrive.

Make a page in html-code with the url´s to favorite sites and search engines, save the page as searchengine or similar in the browser directory. In Netscape, open options in the menubar under General Preferences set the home location url to: C:/netscape/searchengine.htm, or whatever name you´ve given the page.

Feel free to bookmark or copy this MultiSearch form to the browser directory on the harddrive. Remove Tricky Mickey´s url in a texteditor and the form is yours. Use the BACK button on the mouse to get back to this page.

I have added HotBot in a separate search form. HotBot might be the best search engine on the web, even if it´s main page is slowed down by heavy graphics and ad´s. Use this form and access time will be reduced.

Inference find is a robots and scripts site that allows (almost) simultaneously query´s to more than one search engine. Inference is a very useful tool. It will query AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Yahoo! and Webcrawler. Inference will present answers in a special formatted *.htm file which is ready for immediately download and use.

My aim was to keep the user interface on the Multi Search Portal as simple as possible. The intention was to get a complete overview of the search engines without having to scroll down the page.

I thought that HotBot and the Inference find robots and scripts was so useful, that I just had to rewrite the MultiSearch form. Unfortunately the changes resulted in a larger MultiSearch interface and the first intention had to be abandoned.

I am also using a search spider called Solway´s Internet Search for more versatile searches. It is a small and fast freeware program enabling you to search up to eleven search engines simultaneously, and display the results of up to four search engines on one screen (provided that your web browser can handle frames). Solway´s Internet Search is very useful for searching many indexes with great flexibility. The software is to be installed and used from the harddrive on your personal computer. You will find the program here.

The Inference find Search on Tricky Mickey´s Multi Search Portal gives almost the same results, and is easier to use for most searches.

If all this seems complicated, simply use your own bookmark.htm page in the browser directory as a start page to improve search speed and access time to the Web.