This shouldn't be hard", you think to yourself. You want to buy a computer, so you figure the Internet is the best place to look. You get on Alta Vista, and type "computers" in the text box. It comes back and tells you that it has found about 1 million pages matching your query terms. You try another tactic - you type in "I want to buy a computer". Only 400,000 pages this time - and glancing at the descriptions for the first 10 pages, you see places to buy Liberal Bumper Stickers, Foreign Currency, even a Volkswagen, but nothing about buying computers. Frustrated, you try one more time - you type in "computer shopping". Alta Vista happily tells you there are 700,000 pages matching your request. The first listing is indeed about shopping for computers - and the rest on the page refer to on-line malls.
Does this sound familiar? If you've done any amount of Web searching, you've undoubtedly run into this same problem of too much information. This tutorial will you by showing you how these Web Databases work, how you can more efficiently search them, and how to select the best Web Database using the AskScott selection tool.