By Jordanna Smida, Associate Editor

SEARCHING FOR INFORMATION to help you with your football program can often be a frustrating time-consuming task. Most coaches utilize search engines to try to speed up the process.

When you say search engine, most football coaches think Yahoo. Though it might be one of the most popular search engines, it's not necessarily the best.

According to Stephen Rose, a senior instructor with New Horizons in Cincinnati, Ohio, the world's largest computer training corporation, Yahoo.com only finds about 3 to 5 percent of all the pages on the Web.

As of Jan. 1, 2001, there were 3.1 billion Web pages worldwide, Rose says, adding that U.S. domains, which include .com, .edu, .net and .org, make up 1.5 billion of those pages. "Trying to find what you want out of this many pages can be pretty intimidating," he says.

Though the Web's size is intimidating, Rose says the biggest searching problem is that people are too vague or too specific and are not willing to take the time to focus on their search.

Putting Engines To Work

Search engines work in one of two ways, either through paid registration or a technology called spiders, Rose explains.

When a Web page is created it must be registered with a search engine like Yahoo. The page's owner must then submit 50 key words for that page to Yahoo, which adds those words to its database.

"When you search Yahoo, Lycos, Excite or Altavista, you're searching their databases. You may use those search engines and walk away with totally different responses to what you're looking for," Rose explains.

He believes the best search engine out there today is Google. "Google searches 87 percent of the Web pages in the U.S and about 30 percent of the pages worldwide, roughly 1.3 billion Web pages," Rose says, explaining that Google does not allow people to directly submit their links. Instead, Google uses technology called a spider, which combs the Web and captures the first few words on a site's home page for its database.

"Google is very indiscriminate," Rose says. He finds that users tend to get a better, wider range of answers allowing smaller, more specific Web sites to compete directly with larger sites that have more money.

Northern Light is the second best search engine, Rose says. It searches about 67 percent of the Web.

Searching The Top Ten

Another type of search engine available is the compilation search type. Search engines such as dogpile.com and metacrawler.com are compilation search engines, which search the top 10 search engines for the top hits.

"You get about 100 hits, but they tend to be the most popular. But it's a good place to start if you don't know what you're looking for. If you're looking for something more obscure or specific, you'll want to use Google or Northern Light," Rose recommends.

The amount of advertising is also something to consider when using a search engine. Google, which is funded through the sales of their technology, is faster than most other search engines because it doesn't sell advertising space.

"Your search results will come up within 3 to 5 seconds and there's not a lot of duplication," Rose says.

"You know that what you're getting is because you are searching for it and not because some company spent a lot of money advertising," he says. He warns that when using the larger search engines, you tend to find the same sites listed six or seven different ways without realizing the listings are for the same site.

One search engine, NetZero offers free Internet access. However, that means you have advertising competing with your bandwidth. If you're using NetZero, a line of ads needs to be loaded and reloaded, which uses up about one-third of your bandwidth, Rose explains. "If you are logging in at 40K, that means you're searching the Web between 21K and 28K," he says. NetZero also offers an advertising-free option for a fee.

Refining Your Search

Boolean modifiers, such as +, -, AND, quotes, NOT or OR are the key to using a search engine successfully for coaching information. If you type in five or six words for a search, the search engine will treat all of the words the same, Rose explains. "The key is to use AND, OR, NOT, quotation marks, +, or -," he says adding that Boolean modifying words should also be in all capital letters.

When searching the Internet for a particular topic, such as football, you get numerous hits including Web sites with information on related information. To narrow that search, Rose offers the following points:

- Using upper and lower case letters communicates to the search engine that what you've typed is the exact spelling.

- Using all lower case letters says you are unsure of the spelling.

Another Boolean to aid your search is the word NOT. For example, if you were to search non-professional football coaches, you'd type in 'football AND coaches NOT professional'. "Adding the word NOT, excludes the data from the data you're searching for," Rose says.

Be Specific

"You can add as many NOTs as you choose, but the more specific you are in looking for something, the more it may exclude what you are actually looking for," Rose cautions.

For example, when someone registered a Web site, they may have only used the word football even though they have great plays on the site. If you narrow your search, you may miss some valuable sites.

Rose's advice: "Start wide and then get smaller. By being too specific, you're going to find there are topics you are missing and things that you are not going to run into."

Another way to focus your search is by using both AND and OR. The symbols + and - are also useful Boolean modifiers that perform the same function as AND and NOT respectively.

Quotes are another Boolean modifier that can help focus your search. Rose explains that when search words are placed in quotes, that tells the search engine that all of those words must be found together, but in any order.

"Quotes are probably the most powerful way to use a search engine but are extremely specific. If you start your search with quotes, you'll overlook a lot of Web sites," he says.

Each search engine has its preferences for Boolean modifiers. Rose recommends that you click on the advanced search component link when you visit a search engine for football coaching information. This will tell you to whether to use + and - or AND and OR. For example, the search engine Metacrawler prefers +/- compared to Google which prefers AND and OR.