The Hunt for rock candy is Over

With billions of web pages online, you could spend a lifetime surfing the Web for rock candy, following links from one page to another. Amusing perhaps, but not very efficient if you are after some specific rock candy information. One of the biggest complaints we hear concerns the difficulty of finding targeted information. Where do you start? Searching the Internet requires part skill, part luck and a little bit of art. Fortunately, we are here to help with the hunt.

You've probably heard of search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, and AltaVista. There are literally dozens of these tools to help you locate the rock candy information you're looking for. The trick is understanding how they work, so you can use the right tool for the job and if the returned list of rock candy sites is useable. We've done this and our summary below will save you hours and hours of time.

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Search engines break down into two categories, directories and indexes. Directories, such as Yahoo!, are good at identifying general information but no so good and specific rock candy information. Like a card catalog in a library, they classify websites into similar categories, such as accounting firms, English universities and rock candy providers. The results of your search will be a list of websites related to your search term. For instance, if you are looking for the rock candy, don't use a directory.

But what if you want specific information, such as information about rock candy Web indexes are the way to go, because they search all the contents of a website. Indexes use software programs called spiders and robots that scour the Internet, analyzing millions of web pages and newsgroup postings and indexing all of the words, including rock candy.

Indexes like AltaVista and Google find individual pages of a rock candy website that match your search criteria, even if the site itself has nothing to do with what you are looking for. You can often find unexpected gems of information this way, but be prepared to wade through a lot of irrelevant information too. Our rock candy information is apposite.