Introduction

Yahoo is an Internet Guide. It is a searchable directory of Web content that has been available since 1994. There are over half a million sites divided into more than 25,000 categories. Yahoo is also a Web portal that provides access to a large number of services including e-mail, chat rooms, shopping, maps, stock quotes, etc.

This workshop will focus on Yahoo - http://www.yahoo.com/.

Yahoo! Help Central includes a tutorial for Web surfing and information on everything that Yahoo! has to offer.

There are two ways to find information using Yahoo - Search and Browse

Search Yahoo

• You should search Yahoo when you are looking for a specific topic.
• Yahoo search looks for three main things.
  1. Yahoo categories.
  2. Web sites listed in Yahoo.
  3. Web pages indexed by Google, a partner search engine.

Getting Results

• The first set of results are Yahoo categories.
• The second set are sites listed with the categories that contain them.
• The third set is the results of a full-text search of the entire Web provided by the Google search engine.

Do a search

• Type Buffalo in the Yahoo search field. Click on search.
• The first set of results shows the number of categories containing the term "buffalo"
• The second set displays the links to the Web sites with "buffalo" in the the name
• The third set displays Web sites collected from the search engine from the entire Web
• The different sets of displays can be accessed from links at the top of the display screen

Browsing Yahoo

• Yahoo is a searchable directory.
• You can browse through a hierarchy of information.
• You can navigate your way through a directory from the general to the very specific.
• There are fourteen top categories.
• When you are in Yahoo's hierarchy directory, the title at the top of the page is hyperlinked.  Each section of the title is linked and you can move around within those categories.

Let's browse

• I want to find information about house plants.
• Select a category from the Yahoo home page where you think your subject might be.
• Click on Recreation & Sports because Recreation seems to be the best choice
• Click on Home and Garden.
• Click on Houseplants.
• In this area there are several categories of houseplants and a list of Web sites about houseplants.

Some hints about using Yahoo

• Sometimes sites and categories fit in more than one place. There are cross-referenced categories.
• Cross-referenced categories have the @ sign following the link
• All sites that sell a product are listed in the Business category
• All sites are listed in their regional area

Other Features

...and much, much more!

Other Web Portals

There are many other Web portals, including:

• Altavista
• Excite 
• Lycos 
• Go 
• Look Smart  
• MSN 
• Search.com
• Best Search Tools from InFoPeople

More Guides to the Web

How do Internet search engines work? Search Engine Watch has all the answers.

The InvisibleWeb is a search engine of search engines that catalogs over 10,000 special interest search sites.

Another good source for information about searching the Internet comes from the Librarians' Index to the Internet.

There is too much junk on the Net! How can you find the good stuff? Here is a Guide to Critical Thinking About What You See on the Web. It's part of Ithaca College's wonderful ICYouSee Guide to the World Wide Web.

Here are some links to more resources for evaluating information on the Internet