When you think about your internet search habits, would you agree that you’re often searching for an ‘answer’, rather than a ‘webpage’? For example, you may want to check what time a movie is screening this weekend. To find that, you first have to search for the cinema’s homepage, then look up the movie times. Wouldn’t it be great if you could find the movie times with one quick search? Some of the bigger search tools such as Yahoo! (http://au.yahoo.com/) now have a range of shortcuts which help you to find ‘answers’ quickly and easily, without wading through ‘websites’.
If you need to find out the current time in London, you could type search words such as “international time” or “time conversion” into a search engine, choose a likely website from the results, then use the conversion tool on that website. With Yahoo!, simply type “time in London”, and the first result presented is a Yahoo! Shortcut which tells you the current time and date in London, UK. Below that you will find the usual list of search results.
Try typing “weather Perth” into Yahoo! and the first result is another Yahoo! Shortcut, this time showing the current time, temperature, conditions (raining, fine etc) and expected high and low temperatures for Perth.
A full list of Shortcuts relevant to Australian searchers is available at http://au.docs.yahoo.com/info/search/shortcuts.html
To see how far Yahoo! has extended this type of service, check out the US Shortcuts list at http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/
Another useful service that Yahoo! offers is its speciality sites (http://au.docs.yahoo.com/more/index.html), which act as one-stop-shops for a variety of searches, products and services. For example, the Sports area has a NRL site at http://au.sports.yahoo.com/nrl/ where you can keep track of Rugby League news, check the points table, enter your comments in a discussion board, get information about the teams and much more. Check out the other specialty services such as News, Finance, Cars, Real Estate and Jobs.
Need some help searching the Web? Contact us and we'll do our best to help. Anything useful or interesting will be included in future articles (Confidentiality and your privacy are assured).
Thuringowa Library Services - Information Desk
Ph: 4773 8601
Email: infodesk@thuringowa.qld.gov.au
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Searchlight is a weekly column written by CityLibraries Townsville. It is published in the Townsville Bulletin newspaper and on this 'blog every Monday. Searchlight aims to make your internet searching more effective, efficient and fun by reviewing search tools, providing searching hints and tips, and helping with tricky search topics.
