Searching the internet is a drag, when you are looking for fly patterns, or other fly tying information. You key in words such as; Fly Tying, and it the Enter Key with lots of listings that do not meet your needs.
I have in the past used Alta Vista.com as my search engine, but now I have found something that is more precise and there is not a bad listing in the bunch. That Search Engine is Bing.com
Key in the work Fly Tying, and you get the following…
Fly Tying, Fly, Fly Tying Patterns, Fly Tying Supplies, Fly, Tying Materials, Fly Tying Kits, Fly Tying Vises, Fly Tying Instructions, Fly Tying Forums. Which helps weed out the sites that do not apply to your search.
Now, I guess I’m a Google convert. I use so much of their stuff…the search engine, obviously, Gmail, blogger for my blog, google maps, earth, chrome, docs, etc…
A tip for search engines: try using search terms that your target site will have that other sites wont. At least not in your combinations.
Example: You’re hunting down a tutorial for a grey fox dry. Searched individually, “grey”, “fox”, “dry”, “fly”, and “tying” will get you all kinds of results. Searching for “fly tying” will get you lots of baseball hits for a deep fly ball bringing in the tying run. “grey fox” will return the animal, but all together, there aren’t many sites other than tying sites that will have all of those terms in prominent areas, in prominent text (like titles, headings, etc).
It is likely this should be in the Sound Off forum, but anyway…
<rant>
The problem with anything that Microsoft does anymore is that they are too big to be innovators anymore. They react to what others have done that is making money. They haven’t really come up with anything new for the last decade. They looked at Yahoo and said, “Dang! Those guys are making money with that! Let’s do it.” and then there was Hotmail. There was who? Another also ran. Bing will be the same with searching. it will get a few converts but it will never surpass Google. It is reaching a point that when someone mentions something new from Microsoft is that all it means is that someone else did it better 10 years ago!
</rant>
Bing is too new to have been able to index much of the web, yet. The way that you are used to searching on AltaVista works really well on Google. At least it does for me.
If there’s a pattern you can’t find ask here, but beware!!! You’ll have a WHOLE lot of bookmarks lol. Stick with Google for stuff in the US, I use Toxic Lemon web search for overseas stuff but it’s going through a major overhaul right now and I hope they don’t screw it up.
One of the biggest keys to searching is using quotes. When you search for something in quotes it looks for that exact string of characters. When you search for multiple words NOT in quotes the results will contain ANY of those words individually. Better yet goto the Advanced Search page for any search engine to help narrow down what you’re looking for.
