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Organising Your Web Searches: Web Search Software
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So what do you do after amassing all this information about your chosen topics? The job of organising it is a major one. Broadly speaking you can organise the information by storing the information in one of the following ways:
- A list of searches. Here you simply retain certain searches that you made on certain engines. This usually requires special software that can remember which engines you searched and what you searched for within them. Search Rocket is an example of such an approach.
- A list of URLs. Here you save links to selected pages as "Favourites" or "Bookmarks", and assign them to certain categories if you wish. All browsers provide a facility for storing and organising URLs in this way, but there are software tools which can make this more powerful, such as Jet Links.
- A set of downloaded web pages. Here you actually download certain pages onto your own computer's hard disk drive and store them. (This is not the same as using the browser's "history" facility which is unreliable - the browser cache can only retain certain types of pages - and will only save pages for as many days as you have specified under the browser's options menu). Most browsers allow pages to be specifically saved via the File menu. It is possible to download whole websites using most browsers, but this can overwhelm one with too much information, especially if the site one is downloading is very large.
Moreover, the problem with any set of downloaded web pages is that they can contain a lot of superfluous content. Ideally you would probably want to be able to edit web pages before storing them to remove unnecessary content and there is software such as Notes Pilot that will enable you to do just this. It is a very useful tool, quick and easy to use. The problem, with this method, however, is that one does not end up with a set of fully integrated "standalone" documents. Web pages consist of text and images which are actually stored in separate files. This is fine when the downloaded web page is solely for one's own use, but not so convenient if one wishes, for example, to email the page to someone else. To do so, one would have to email the images as well as the pages.
- A set of documents containing copied web page content. Recent versions of Microsoft Word are extremely good at downloading web page via the simple action of copying and pasting the relevant parts of the web pages. This enables the content to be edited. This process of editing copied web pages in MS Word can be rather tedious but it does work well. I have tried other Word Processors (and there are cheaper alternatives to MS Word) but none of these can deal with copied web page content in the way MS Word does. For sharing of information this is the best method because, unlike method 3, the text and images from a web page are stored in the same file, i.e. a MSWord .doc file.
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