The internet is a big place, so big in fact that no-one knows how big it is, and it gets bigger every day - it's an expanding cyber-universe. You will have noticed that the internet is not a well-organised place, there is no shortage of information but it is not a nice orderly encyclopaedia and finding the little snippet of information that you want is not always straightforward. This article is a brief summary of how I go about finding stuff, I hope you find it useful.
I enjoy searching for stuff, the most frequent sort of search I make is to see a picture of some obscure lure or to compare prices, but just surfing around is fun as well.
The Lure Fishing UK links page is as good a place as any to start some casual surfing, I try to keep it up to date, removing dead links and including new ones. The rule is that any website included has been of some interest to me as a lure angler, I won't include general fishing websites that don't have strong lure or predator content, but peripheral information like weather or water information is in. I don't discriminate against websites that are poorly designed, it is content that counts, and I admit that my own is hardly the most visually appealing. It is annoying to find websites that are nearly impossible to navigate, or that have 5 minute download times for an utterly pointless Flash animation on the front page, but such is the diversity of the web and someone must pay designers to do that stuff. I never look at a website without checking its links page, I've found some real gems this way that hardly ever show up on search engines.
So that is casual surfing, now to specific searches. This is where it gets really interesting, and a little complicated. You have to use a search engine if you want to do a search. There are many search engines, with various merits and features.
For searching for sites in the UK I like Alta Vista (uk.altavista.com) or Yahoo (uk.search.yahoo.com), they are both easy to use. To give an idea about how to go about a search I'll look at Yahoo.
The first thing to notice is that immediately beneath the search box you have a choice of 'the web', 'in UK, and 'in Ireland'. If you want a worldwide search then 'the Web' is the one to select. For a national search choose one of the others, but even in these national options you will get some international hits, but local ones will be at least on the first page or two and so easier to find.
Above the search box there are some other options: the first two are the ones I use, 'Web' means it will simply search for a website, 'Images' though means it will search for pictures of what you enter. But, it will only find pictures if the file name is a match for your search, many websites use abbreviations or just numbers for their pictures. If you are desperate to find a picture you have to think about how any abbreviations might be formed and try those, it can be a long job!
To the right of the search box there are further options. 'Advanced Search' allows you to tune your search in to help you get more relevant results. Look at all the options and use them, you will find similar preferences on all search engines.
One very important point, check your spelling! The search engine looks for the word you have entered, not the one you think you have entered. I get a report of the searches made of Lure Fishing UK, about a third are wrongly spelt, they will not find what they are looking for.
When you've entered your search and the list of links have appeared remember (if you are using MS Internet Explorer) to hold down the 'shift' key when you click on the link to open the website in a new window. You can then have several pages opening at once so you don't have to sit there waiting for ages! If you get a "page not available" warning just click the refresh button on the toolbar, if there is still no response try looking for another page on that website and linking to it from there. So if your link is something long and complicated like: "www.greatlures.com/catalogue/crankbaits/superduperdiver.htm" or similar, just type the "www.greatlures.com" domain name in the address bar, hit 'enter' and try to find it from there. Usually the reason for these messages is just that the server is busy, there are only so many phone lines and if IE or the server detects that the data is coming through at too slow a rate then it gives up. Try again when the web is not so busy.
If I want to search world-wide I will still use Yahoo and Alta Vista, but there are other options: Alltheweb (www.alltheweb.com) enters your search into other search engines and pulls out the most relevant results. If you are having difficulty finding something it is possibly because it is not on one of those websites that the search engine thinks is most relevant, so try to use the 'advanced' options to refine your search.
If I'm looking for a major site, Google (www.gooogle.com) is useful because it rates websites on the number of other websites that have links to them, so it filters the obscure stuff out and tends to find the main websites, but it's not so useful on newer websites that don't have many incoming links. If you are searching for a retail or manufacturing company it is worth trying to find business directories, these are commercial websites that charge businesses for listing them. It is amazing how many small businesses pay for this but don't make any effort to get free listings on the major search engines and free directories, I guess they don't understand the web. The directories are often regional so are especially useful if you know which area or city you are looking for.
Now if these options fail to find what you are looking for it is time to get digging. What is the country of origin of your search objective? If any online information exists it is most likely to be on websites based in that country, and written in that country's language. All the search engines I've listed so far are heavily weighted towards U.S. and U.K. websites, so now it is time to start delving into foreign language search engines. Obviously this is not going to be too easy, but it is surprising how different language search engines all look the same, just with different words describing the functions - you can usually guess what they mean.
Say you want to find an item made in Germany, you could put a search into Alta Vista for "German search engines", which will give you a big list - try a few, you might get one that helps. A simpler tack is to try the Yahoo search engine for that country - so Italy would be www.yahoo.it - this works for most countries. Problems will arise when you are looking for stuff in say Russia, which uses a different alphabet, but if you've got this far you should be able to work something out!
Stick at first to brand names and products for the search, but remember that brand names are usually surnames, and "Rapala" for instance is a common Finnish surname, so you will turn up loads of genealogy sites, amongst others. If you can find a fishing website in that country - have a look on my links page again - look at the words that are used on the pages that show a similar product to what you want, like "fiske", or "wobbler" ('wobbler' means crankbait or trolling lure in many northern European languages), then tie that word in with your search to narrow it down. As soon as you find a fishing site don't ignore the links pages (quite often the word "links" is universal). It is always worth trying something like "Sweden" and "fishing", there is often an English language page with tourist information, this will have links to other fishing websites, keep following those links. If you can find out what a few relevant words are in the language like "pike" or "fishing" or "lure" you will also shorten the odds, although some apparently simple words have no obvious direct equivalent and are only relevant in context - all part of the fun!
When searching foreign language websites some words will be the same as in English, it's always worth trying technical lure fishing words like 'jerkbait', crankbait', 'baitcasting' or 'bait casting', 'topwater', 'spinner' or even 'reel', because there may be no equivalent word in the language and they will have used the original English (American, actually!) term.
Having finally found a page with the information that you require you are still stuck because it is in a language you cannot read although obviously you still have brand names, so looking for say Rapala will usually find some lures. Always check the homepage for an English version - but an email to the contact address will usually get a response in English, or something quite a lot like English.
I have enjoyed many search sessions - most notable was for a picture of a "Jensen Tobis" spoon. It took over an hour, but I got one in the end using a Swedish search engine which found it on a .pdf document. With determination you can find just about anything!
If you are not using broadband then to help load pages quicker you can turn off the pictures, animations, sounds etc that slow everything down. Go to the IE Tools menu, select Internet Options, select the advanced tab, scroll down until you reach the Multimedia section, untick all the boxes that you don't need. You can go back and tick them when you need to see all pictures, or simply right click on space where a picture should be, select "Show Picture" and it will download. Surfing without pictures can be very fast.
If all else fails then try posting a question on the forum, someone might know where the information can be found.
Good hunting!
