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Current News To help you find current news and information many search engines and directories include a hyperlink to a "What's New" page. Yahoo offers links titled "News," "Sports", and "Weather." Many search engines offer you the option of choosing a date range so you can find the latest information. HotBot offers a supersearch page where you can search before or after a given date. This will limit results to pages published within a specified period of time. Altavista also allows you to search by a range of dates. If you want to find up to date news from newspapers, the Internet Public Library is a great site to visit. They also have links to online magazines categorized by subjects. Excite's News Tracker and VPOP technologies' NewsHub allows you to search the content of current news stories in multiple publications. NewsTracker searches the contents of over 300 newspapers and NewsHub updates its news database with information from several major wire services every 15 minutes. NewsTracker's search results are sorted by stories that it gathered from wire services and those it gathered from Web sites that publish current news. Each news report entry includes a hyperlink to the Web site that contains the story, the news report's source, a brief summary, the date that NewsTracker's spider first found the item on the Web, the relevance percentage to your search, and a link to a list of related news stories. Weather Reports Weather.com is a great site for weather reports as is wunderground.com and accuweather.com. Usually it's a good idea to check more than one weather related site because each site's local report may vary slightly to greatly. Obtaining Maps and City Guides MapQuest.com is a great site for getting online maps. It offers local maps that can be expanded and shrunk, as well as driving directions and a trip planner. mapblast.com, and mapsonus.com are two other sites offering similar services. Citysearch.com is a great site for finding local information, especially if you live in a big city. However, you can search for pizza in Hillsborough.
Finding Businesses Sites that store only information about businesses are often called yellow pages sites. BigYellow.com is operated by Bell Atlantic. Therefore, it has listings for over 17 million businesses. Listings include the name, address, telephone number, and a hyperlink to a map server entry for each firm. Finding People and Related Privacy Concerns Many Web sites let you search for individuals' names, addresses, and telephone numbers. These sites are often called white pages sites. Switchboard.com is one such site. Many people are concerned about privacy violations. In some cases, unlisted numbers have been published on white page sites. Other sites grouped individual listings by categories including religious or political affiliation. As a result, most of these sites offer you a way to remove your information. But what if you don't know your information is available online? Anywho.com is another great yellow page/white page site. Multimedia Resources When downloading multimedia from the Web it is important to note whether the item is copyrighted. There are many Websites that offer free rights-free clip art in the public domain. On the other end of the coin, there are sites that explicitly state that they own the multimedia available on the site and you are not allowed to put the files on your own Web site or distribute them in any manner. There are also web sites that offer multimedia files for a fee. The book claims that there are cartoonists who constantly search the Web for scanned images of their cartoons. If they find a site with the scanned images, they threaten to sue if the images are not taken off the site immediately. Images and Graphics Most images on the Web are in one of two file formats, GIF and JPEG. GIF, an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, supports 256 colors and is normally used for line drawings. JPEGs support millions of colors and are commonly used as a format for storing photographs. JPEG is an acronym for Joint Photographic Experts Group. GIFs can be animated or interlaced. Animated GIFs are made up of a series of image files that rotate to create a "movie like" impression. Since animated GIFs are made up of multiple images, they often take much longer to download than standard GIFs. Interlaced GIFs don't load from top to bottom. They load intermittently line by line. Both file formats are compressed, which means that information is removed from the image to allow it to be small enough for modems to download at a reasonable rate. Image files created for print publications generally are not compressed and are of much higher quality. Compression is not an all or nothing proposition. For example, a graphic artist can create a GIF file with 256 colors, but compress the image so that only two colors show. Less colors means a smaller file size. With JPEGs, greater compression occurs when the Web designer decides that a larger portion of the image can actually be erased. If you've ever seen a fuzzy graphic on the Web, it's likely due to excessive compression. The designer has decided it's more important to have a small graphic than one that is aesthetically pleasing. Sounds, Music and Video Clips These types of files are available on the Web, but they often require that you download software to your computer so that you can view/listen to the files. The software programs are usually free. Real Player, Windows Media Player, Apple Quicktime are three divergent audio/video software applications that support Web music and video. Most users have all three applications installed. An older older file format is the Wave format developed by Microsoft and IBM. WAV files play on any Windows computer with a sound card, but are very large. A WAV file that stores one minute of CD quality music can be 1MB is size. Another commonly used format is the MIDI file (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). This format is a standard adopted by the music industry for controlling devices that create and read music information. The MIDI format does not actually contain the music itself. It contains digital information about each element of the sound including its pitch, length and volume. Therefore, depending on your sound card, MIDI files can either sound almost life like, or like something played on a 10 dollar keyboard. Because they don't contain the actual music, MIDI files are incredibly small in file size. Most midi files are under 100K for an entire song, often much below. A new technique for transferring both sound and video files on the Web is streaming transmission. With streaming transmission, the file is sent to your computer a little at a time. The application playing the streaming transmission buffers the data so it always is playing a little behind of the data coming in. If the buffer runs out, the transmission is cut off while the buffer reloads. Streaming data is not stored in your temporary internet files directory. It is released from memory permanently after it is played. This way, you can listen to online radio stations for hours without worrying about your hard drive filling up. Even 56K modem users can use streaming transmissions although the broadcasts are a much richer experience over high speed lines. The RealNetwork pioneered streaming transmission and remains one of the leaders today. MPEG and AVI are older video file formats. Evaluating the Quality of Web Research Resources
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