Catalogs and Engines and Spiders, Oh My!
Reprinted with permission, Cat Fanciers' Almanac, April 1996
The fancy has quite a few "Web Surfers" who spend a significant portion of
their "between show" hours browsing the WWW. But they weren't always that
know-it-all, devil-may-care surfin' fool they are now. At some point, each
and every one of them sat down at a PC with Internet access for the very first
time and had no clue what to do.
Surf the 'net? I can't even find the (insert expletive here) thing!
Well, okay; let's find the web first. If you have purchased internet access
from an internet provider, chances are you were given some software to make
the job easier. [If not, talk to a computer-geek friend and they'll be able
to provide you with some...and maybe even help you install it.] At least one
of these tools should be a web browser. The most popular of these is
Netscape, a shareware tool designed to run under Windows and to give you
multimedia access to the WWW.
Uh, excuse me? Shareware? I know about hardware, software, silverware,
casual wear, everywhere, and anywhere, but what's shareware?
Well, my little WWW novice, shareware is software that has been developed to
be copied and shared with your friends. The theory is if you try it before
you buy, you'll like it enough to want a legal copy. If you don't like it,
you're supposed to delete it from your computer and it won't have cost you
anything. Shareware tends to be significantly less expensive than commercial
software, but these days is at least as good as the expensive stuff. In any
case, Netscape (at about $39 MSRP) is about the best shareware web browser you can currently find for the money.
So let's assume your service provider gave you a copy of Netscape and a set of
instructions on installing your internet access software. After installation,
Netscape is an icon (a small graphic about thumbnail-sized) under Windows.
Just double-click your left mouse button on the Netscape icon and the WWW will
be at your fingertips.
Fine. Now I've got my fingers stuck in the web (eeewwwww!!!). How do I find
all the fun stuff, genius?
Your service provider probably has a home page for Netscape to start from.
You can actually start from almost anywhere, but it's probably smartest to
start from your own server. If you're looking at somebody's slick display on
your screen and the words "Document: Done" appear at the bottom of your
Netscape window, then you're ready to surf! If you don't have a ready URL
(remember that term from when we showed you the new CFA home page?), then
click your mouse cursor on the button marked "Search." This will bring up a
list of search engines.
Oh, jeez. Now I gotta know about engines? I'm no mechanic! What if it
breaks down out in the middle of nowhere? I'll be lost in cyberspace!
Now, now. Calm down, my little neophyte. Don't get your virtual shorts in a
knot. As we mentioned last month, search engines are used to find all the
good stuff on the WWW. But where there are just a few web browsers to choose
from, there are literally dozens of search engines, all of which do
essentially the same thing.
Search engines are tools for finding things on the Internet and the WWW. Some
are restricted to the WWW because they only look for Web pages. Others look
for documents, newsgroup items, and locations where these can be found.
Generally, they have three components: a catalog, a catalog search engine, and
spiders.
WHAT??? SPIDERS??? I have to be an exterminator, TOO??? Spiders. I HATE
spiders. Creepy, crawly little things...
The catalog is a database -- a very large database -- on a server with a large
amount of disk space and the catalog search engine is the software that
actually searches the catalog based on what you tell it you're looking for.
Spiders are programs that continuously search the Web and/or the internet for
new documents, Web pages, storage sites, or whatever it's been tasked to look
for. If the spiders find anything not already in the catalog, they add it in.
Spiders run without ever stopping. It's no wonder there's so much traffic on
the internet; a bunch of it seems to be "critters."
So which search engine do I use?
An excellent question, O Babe-in-the-Web. Let's take a look at some of the
more popular search engines and a couple of "author's favorites."
One of the oldest and largest is the Lycos catalog. It contains about 98% of
the entire Web and adds, deletes, or updates about 50,000 documents each day.
Currently, there are over 11 million Web addresses referenced in the Lycos
catalog. Lycos is operated out of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
PA. It costs nothing to use; in fact, none of these tools we're discussing
will cost you anything. Lycos is used the same way most of the other search
engines are used. You may either click on links from the Lycos home page and
look at some recommended or popular sites, or there will be a box on the
screen where you may enter a keyword to search on. Suppose, for example, you
want to search for sites about pet food. Enter "pet food" (quotation marks
included) in the search box and either press the return key or click your
mouse cursor on the search button. When your topic of interest is more than a
single word, enclose it in quotation marks. In our example, if the quotation
marks were omitted, you'd get all references to pets and to food; that's a lot
more than you wanted and most of it not what you needed.
Another of the popular catalogs is Yahoo. Typically, Yahoo is the first
search engine used by the neophyte websurfer. Yahoo organizes its sites by
interest area, so you effectively click your mouse cursor on increasingly
narrower catagories of information until you find something interesting. You
also have the search option like in Lycos. Yahoo also collects statistics on
how many times certain sites are accessed and then offers a list of the 25
most popular Web sites...sort of an electronic David Letterman. If you're
just looking for interesting "stuff" and not something in particular, visit
Yahoo.
Some search engines just index document titles or home page file names in
their catalogs. Others, like Open Text Index, index every word that appears
in the referneced document or Web page. Where Yahoo is more like a WWW "table
of contents," OTI is more like the index at the back of the book. OTI has
about the same number of pages indexed as Lycos does, but OTI has about 20
billion words indexed. If you're looking for something very specific, say for
example Russian Blues, OTI will turn up far more references than Lycos. A
Lycos search will give you any documents or home pages with "Russian Blue" in
the title, but OTI will tell you about everywhere on the internet it knows the
words exist. If you search for more than one keyword, OTI will let you assign
a weight to each keyword, thus optimizing your search results. For the
researcher, Open Text Index may be your very best friend.
One of the most popular search engines is WebCrawler, now owned and operated
by America OnLine. WebCrawler is very easy to use, is quick, and has a nifty
little logo. If you're looking for a quick-and-dirty search on a particular
subject, WebCrawler may be your best bet. There is a cost, though; the reason
WebCrawler is quick is its database is very small, referencing some 3% of the
Web. If you want to do a comprehensive search for something, don't use this
search engine. On the other hand, if you're just surfin' the 'net and looking
for interesting "stuff," then WebCrawler is ideal.
There are specialized search engines, too. Magellan not only searches the Web
for you, but also has reviews of Web sites written by an editorial team
employed by The McKinley Group, an international publisher. Its homepage also
presents you with 23 topics to explore if you're just surfin'. Excite also
reviews Web sites and has some 50,000 of them on file for you to browse. It
also has classified ads! In addition to a keyword search, employs a
concept-based search. If you provide more than one keyword to Excite, say for
example Japanese Bobtail, the search will be on Japanese and/or Bobtail. You
will get all references to either word, but a preference to references with
both words. So, in addition to references on Japanese Bobtails, you may get
references on Japanese cuisine and bobtail trucks. Use Excite if you want to
do a "fuzzy" search on a subject.
Fuzzy search? You want me to look for fuzzy things on the Internet?
No, hairball, a fuzzy search is one that's not distinctly defined. That is,
you get a match on exact keyword matches and close keyword matches, like
Japanese cuisine and bobtail trucks in our example above. It's the match
that's fuzzy, not the subject.
There are a couple of search engines I like to use (this is Dan talking). If
you're a real Internet newbie and really into gratuitous graphics, try using
Tsunami. The graphics take a little longer to
load, but it presents you some nice topics to surf and it looks pretty. To
research this article, I used a search engine called W3 Search Engine whose
sole pupose is to look for search engines. The authors call it a search
engine meta-index (slick name, eh?).
There are so many more search engines out there and such limited space here, I
can't do true justice to the subject. If you're curious, just use one of the
engines mentioned here and search on the keyword "search engine." But rather
than dwell on this topic any further, let's use what we've talked about and
look at some interesting sites that turned up on a search on "Pet Food" and on
"veterinarian."
Pet Food Company sites
The World Wide Web is an excellent promotional tool for pet food
companies, and while only a few are taking advantage of it at the moment,
more are expected to "hop on the bandwagon" in the coming months.
The Iams Company is currently the largest of the pet food companies with a WWW site that encourages
visitors to discover what's new at their website, details of product
descriptions, including why one would need a special food for kittens and
older cats, and suggested feeding guidelines. A Vets Corner is a question
and answer page, with basic questions being the norm. Customer Service
for Iams has a link from the main page that can be used to send comments.
Flint River Ranch, a California natural food company site is at and contains general facts about commercial pet
foods, e.g. rancidity in pet foods, and explains their philosophy that natural
food is better. Ingredients are discussed, and full product
information is available as well as the cost.
Martin Pet Foods, a Canadian company with a worldwide market, has
information about their product (TechniCal) on their website
including a product list that gives an
overview of each food and an analysis of it. Their Quality Assurance page
explains details of an April 1995 award they received for their food. Their
Caring for Pets page includes FAQs with answers to questions such as what are
minerals?, what are amino acids?, why is it important that my pet get these in
their pet food? And if you are having trouble finding the TechniCal pet food,
there is a list of names and addresses of stores around the world that carry
the product.
For people interested in information about Ethoxyquin in pet foods, this link
is a series of four articles at
written by John MacDonald of Nova Scotia, Canada.
And if you want to do your shopping for pet food online, there is always
the Natural Pet Products site
which will allow you to fill your virtual shopping cart!
Veterinary Profession
The Veterinary Profession is well represented on the Web. Those interested in
becoming a vet can follow this link to find information on the nature of the work.
The Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph, Ontario is a
veterinary teaching hospital, and its site explains about the college
and its veterinary courses.
At the Special Collections Department of the Iowa State University Library site, one can find the archives of
the American Veterinary Medicine Journals, which has a catalog listing of
manuscripts and a brief description of each.
Most ambitious among all of the vet-related sites is the NetVet Veterinary
Resources Home Page where one can
find a compilation of links to a plethora of veterinary information, including
veterinary and animal resource pages, veterinary and animal science sites,
resource sites which has a link to a list of animal periodicals and vet
journals, Internet Vet Column which is a Q&A format, links to laws and
regulations concerning animals, a listing of animal related mailing lists, and
a page of computer resource sites for programs, etc. relating to the
veterinary profession.
An alternative veterinary medicine page gives one information on both
complementary and alternative veterinary medicine.
Many veterinary clinics are also starting to put up web pages, for example The
Cat Doctor . Note that this site, and any of
the above sites should NOT be used as an alternative to seeking professional
advice from your veterinarian, but as a mode of obtaining further
informational details about feline diseases and treatments.
CONSTRUCTION AREA
We thought it would be fun to explain a little each month about how to construct your own cattery homepage on the World Wide Web. We welcome Orca Starbuck to our team as a technical consultant for our column, and this new area in particular. Orca is well-known on the Internet as one of the webmasters of the Cat Fanciers Home Page, and the Fanciers mailing list and is an expert when it comes to the World Wide Web. In the coming months, we hope to be able to provide you with some tips and tricks to help make your website unique.
Cat fanciers are turning to the Web as a personal publishing and advertisement medium, using it to let the world know about their catteries and themselves. We searched the Lycos service for the word "cattery," and found 184 links to cattery websites on the Web. The same search in the new AltaVista service produced an astounding list of 600 web pages. A search for the same word on DejaNews (which searches newsgroups) came up with 96 references in rec.pets.cats. Clearly, many people in the cat fancy have mastered email and are going on to bigger and better things on the Internet!
This month, let's stop and think about an outline of the information you want to present to the world. Do you have special information about your breed, or about cats in general, that you would like to share? Lovely photographs of your cats that you would like the world to see? Stories about your cattery? In short, what's unique about you and your cattery that you would like the world to know?
Your home page is where you make information about yourself and your cattery available to others on the World Wide Web. It can contain any information you choose to present to the world. You can think of your home page as an article that you are writing about yourself, complete with photographs and references to other publications (such as the CFA Web Site, CFA Breed Profiles and Standards, and so forth). It's more fun than writing a printed article, though, since you can organize it any way you like. You can also make changes at any time, adding frequently updated information such as the shows you are going to and the kittens you currently have available. It's limited only by your imagination and time.
A rough basic outline for a homepage could look like this:
About your cattery
1) history of your cattery
2) which breed(s)
a) link to CFA Breed Profile for overall breed info
b) link to CFA Standard for detailed look
3) characteristics of your chosen breed(s)
4) genetic information re the colors of your cats
5) photos of your favorite cats
6) details of your upcoming litters
7) which shows you are attending, where, and when
OR
About your cattery, its policies & your contributions to responsible pet ownership
1) who you are and why you chose to breed cats
2) breed you work with, and why it's special
a) link to CFA Breed Profile for overall info
b) link to CFA Standard for detailed look
3) photos that best represent your breed
4) awards your cats have received, with photos
5) kittens available (include photos)
6) your policy re selling kittens, and why
a) neuter/spay agreement
b) no-declaw clause
c) health guarantee
7) your club membership(s) and details of club activities
8) your involvement in the promotion of cats in your community
So, you ask, why would you want to use the World Wide Web to advertise your cattery? Here's a few quotes from email sent to people with websites that might give you an idea of the kind of impression you could possibly make:
"Frankly, your home page convinced us of your integrity,
something we can't get from an ad in Cat Fancy."
"Bravo to your spay/neuter policy!"
"We were looking for a new kitten, when your cattery caught our
eye. Love your Website, the pictures are beautiful and we like
the fact that you are a discriminating breeder."
"We only want a kitten from a breeder who is as responsible
when giving his/her kittens to a new family as you are. [...]
If you can't help us at least you know that all the way over in
Hamburg (Germany) there are people who appreciate your
informative pages and the great pictures!"
Finally, remember that a lot of different kinds of people will be visiting your home page. Once your home page is up on a Web server, anyone in the world will be able to visit your home page by typing its URL into a Web browser. At first, most people visiting will be friends that you give your URL to. But after your page is listed in directories on the Web, complete strangers from all over the world will start to visit your page! Keep this in mind, and you will end up with a page that gives a good impression of you and your cattery, and that a wide range of people will enjoy.
In the next column, we'll explain about URL's and introduce you to a few basic HTML formatting "tags".
LOGOUT:
The Veterinarian, a wonderful oil panting by Perez
Top Ten Signs You've Gone to a Bad Veterinarian, David Letterman, no less!
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Page maintained by Karen Lawrence, klawrenc@computan.on.ca. Copyright(c) Karen Lawrence and Dan Petty. Created: 4/10/96 Updated: 6/3/98