http://www.einet.net/howto.html (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)

How to Use Galaxy

The Galaxy is intended to help you find information. This page describes some details of Galaxy organization and capability, as well as some strategies for finding that needle in an Internet.

Bookmarks

Searching

Finding Information with Galaxy

Contact Galaxy Staff (galaxy@einet.net)

Document Bookmarks

Click on the words in the bookmark line to find useful information or to move around the Galaxy. The functions of the words are:

Searching

On each Galaxy page is a bookmark link to a search form like the one below. Enter search keywords in the text pane and select the indexes you wish to search by clicking on the square buttons. The default settings search all Web pages referenced by Galaxy. Click on the Search button (or hit return in the keyword pane) when you're ready to begin the search. Search the Galaxy

Search the Galaxy

The available indexes are:

World Wide Web - this index contains almost all of the thousands of Web pages referenced in the Galaxy. There are three options for searching the Web:

All text - this searches all of the text, and results include title, excerpt, frequent words, outline, Galaxy page source, and other information. If you search from a Galaxy topic page, you have the further option of restricting the search to resources within that topic area by selecting from the pull-down menu, as shown above. (This option is not available from the top Galaxy page.)

Title text - this searches only the titles of Web pages referenced in Galaxy. This helps you find a very specific information reference. (Search for ``Texas'', for example.)

Link text - this searches the text of the links found in the World Wide Web text (above) - over 350,000 links at last count. This helps you find very specific information references.

Galaxy Pages - this index contains only pages of the Galaxy itself. This helps you find collections of references to related information. If you want to add information to Galaxy, use this index to find an appropriate page.

Gopher Titles - this index contains the titles of Gopher menus from much of Gopher Space. To improve search quality, only those Gophers referenced in the Gopher Jewels appear in the index.

Telnet Resources - this index contains the pages of the Hytelnet hypertext telnet database (originally based on work by Peter Scott). These pages provide access to several thousand telnet sites.

Search keywords can be words or phrases. You can use the selection buttons under the search keyword pane to specify whether any or all of the keywords should be present in the results. Alternately, the terms "and", "or" and "not" can be used to create boolean phrases which restrict the search results. For example:

   biomechanical biomedical and engineering not computing

means "those documents containing the word biomechanical or biomedical and the word engineering but not the word computing." (The phrase is evaluated left to right, with implied or where no boolean connector appears.)

Search keywords are ``stemmed'' so that they match various forms of the keyword. The keyword "running" also matches "run" and "runs". Another way of finding various word forms is to use a keyword prefix. These are specified using an asterisk ("*") after the prefix so that all words matching the prefix are selected. For example:

  
   jor*

will match "jordan", "Jorgensen", and "Jordanstown".

Finding Information with Galaxy

Finding information in a timely manner requires that you think about your task beforehand. Adopt a strategy based on what you know about what you're looking for:

Do you know what general topic the information is related to?
You can navigate down the topic hierarchy by following the Topics links on each Galaxy page to the place you feel the information reference should be, then scan the entries and canned search results for that page.
If you aren't sure where the information you're looking for would be be in a topical organization, you can search the Galaxy Pages index. The results show you which Galaxy pages contain information related to your search keywords. Try this with "botany" and "television".
Do you know a specific name or title?
Search the titles of the World Wide Web. This will quickly locate a reference if one exists in the Galaxy. For example, the NSF's High Performace Computing and Communications centers can be found by searching for "HPCC". However, if you search using the full name, you miss several HPCC-related references. So, include both names and acronyms as search terms.
If you can't find a reference among Web titles, search the link text of the World Wide Web and Gopher indexes. If what you are looking for is a service or is likely to be related to an academic institution, search Telnet resources as well. index as well. If all else fails, search the World Wide Web Full-text database.
Do you know one or more qualities or characteristics?
This strategy often requires several cycles of searching, browsing, and evaluation. Associated information such as author, geographical location, related organizations, history, etc, can be used to find a specific reference.
Imagine, for example, that you would like to find books by a science fiction author whose name you can't recall, but would recognize (a familiar scenario to me!). Your task is to find the author's name (via his literary genre) and then to find books written by that author.
A list of prominent SF authors would be likely to contain the desired name. So, search the World-wide Web and Gopher indexes for "science and fiction and author". (Use "and" between the words to indicate that they should all be present in documents you wish to find. This helps eliminate irrelevant search results.)
The Web search results show the Future Fantasy Bookstore - a good candidate to start with. After looking around in this hypertext catalog, we find a link called award-winning books. This list contains Philip Jose Farmer, whom we recognize as the author in question.
Now, use the author's name to search the Web and Gopher indexes. The Web results seem unlikely (the top score is for "Recipes for Traditional Food in Slovenia"), but the Gopher results show four precise references, one of which (Farmer,Philip_Jose [15Dec92, 4kb]) contains a complete list of Farmer's books. Bingo!

Several hints to ease the search process:

Don't count on history lists. When you find a place you know you'll need to return to, clone a new window or add the page to your hotlist.
Collect topic-specific hotlists. For each topic you will re-visit on a regular basis, make a named hotlist. This avoids fetching and re-evaluating the same information over and over.
Use differentiating search keywords. Commonly-used words make poor search keywords. Extremely common words such as articles and prepositions are so worthless that they are ignored completely. Strive for words which highlight the differences between information sources. "Cryonics," for example, is extremely specific. Common words, when combined with boolean qualifiers, can be effective. For example, "biomedical engineering" is an awful search phrase, since positive scores are given to documents containing either word, and both words are fairly ubiquitous. On the other hand, the boolean phrase "biomedical and engineering" limits the results to a handful of candidates.
Understand the search results. The kind of data an index contains can have dramatic effects on the search process. A particular keyword phrase may work wonderfully on one index, and poorly on another. Try to understand how the keywords you specify relate to the results. This helps you form an intuition about the process and the data.