Search Engine Reviews: Yahoo and Northern Light + Boolean Basics: Using The NEAR Operator
Weather forecasts, roadmaps, and U.S. yellow and white page information work well for the most part (although the yellow page listings I received were for the wrong location).
I've discussed only a small number of Yahoo's noteworthy services. For a more complete listing, go to More Yahoos.
NORTHERN LIGHT - RESEARCH ON AND OFF THE WEB
Northern Light (http://www.northernlight.com) is a quick, effective, full-fledged Web page search engine with an added feature - its Special Collection. This is a searchable collection (covering many subjects) of over 1800 magazines, journals, reviews, newswires and books which are not readily available on the
You can place an order for an article with Northern Light (at a fee of $1 to $4 per item) and view it instantly on line. If you're doing research for school, your job, or whatever, this may save you hours at the library.
Format of Results:Search coverage in Northern Light is generally comprehensive, and the resulting items have an especially useful format. While item descriptions are standard, each result specifies the item's type (e.g. article, review, encyclopedia item), its source (e.g. personal page, commercial, site, educational site), and the relevant date.
Search features: In Northern Light, every search is automatically refined by folders representing subsets of results which emphasize different aspects of the subject. You can choose whether to click on a folder and look at these results.
Boolean searching is available only for the OR and NOT operators, which is surprising in a search engine intended for serious research. (Northern Light promises to extend its Boolean search capacity in the future.) In addition, there are no special syntax for searching on particular attributes such as title or URL.
Assuming its search capabilities improve, Northern Light seems destined to eventually become one of the premier Web search engines.
TARGET YOUR SUBJECT WITH the NEAR OPERATOR
Sometimes, your subject can't quite be encompassed with a phrase, yet searching with subject words gives you too many irrelevant results. For example, let's say you're searching for ways to train your puppy to stop chewing on your shoes.
You could use the phrase "puppy training," but you'd miss wordings like "training your puppy" or "training a young puppy," etc. If you search with the words "puppy" and "training," you'll probably get numerous results which don't focus on your subject.
One solution to this problem is the NEAR operator which is available in many search engines, including Alta Vista (http://altavista.digital.com) and Lycos
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