Using search engines to find information on the Web.

The biggest library on earth, the largest collection of information, opinion, art and music ever assembled, is on your desk.

It's the Internet, of course, a spectacular resource for anybody who needs a particular piece of information. The Web is huge - so huge, in fact, that you couldn't possibly find your way through it without a map. So today, we're going to talk about the electronic maps that are supposed to steer you through the zillions of pages of online information on the Internet until you reach (sometimes) the single datum you need to find.

In Web-speak, these navigators are called "search engines." They comprise one of the greatest bargains going, because each search engine is the function of thousands of person-hours of work, which you can tap into for free. If you get good at using one or more of them, you can often find a single needle of information in the vast haystack of the Internet, and do it in a matter of minutes.

There are countless search engines on the Net. The major general-interest services are Yahoo!, Infoseek, Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, and Hotbot. You can get to any of them by typing in the name in the address space at the top of a Net browser. Many of the standard Internet Service Providers, such as NetCom, have a button on their home pages marked "Search." Click on it, and it will take you automatically to one or more of these search engines.

Although they try to differentiate themselves, the various search engines look pretty much alike. There's a box at the top of the first page. You type in some thumbnail version of what you're looking for and hit the button that says Search.

It was so beastly hot last week, for example, that we started thinking about snowboarding just to cool off. That reminded us that we want to buy a new board, with one of the new step-in bindings, for next season. But which binding would be best? We figured (accurately, as it turned out) that the Internet would be full of information and reviews on snowboard bindings, provided both by the manufacturers and by users. So we went looking.

We typed in the phrase "snowboard AND binding" and hit the search button. This produced so many different sites - more than 10,000 of them - that we went back and refined the search terms. This time we typed in some delimiters - "AND step-in AND NOT ski." That still left us with several thousand Web pages to look at, but the search engines do their best to list the most appropriate ones first. And sure enough, we found just about everything we wanted to know in the top 30 listings or so.

There are lots of extraneous items on the first page of each Search Engine. Most of them have buttons that will take you to information on the weather, the stock market, news headlines, etc. The hot new idea in search services is to divide the Internet into "channels" of information, such as arts, sports, music, etc. This assumes that people use the Net the way they channel-surf on a TV - an assumption that is pretty far off base, in our view. If you're searching for something, it's best to ignore these limiting buttons.

The nicest thing about these search services is that they're free. And yet, Yahoo!, Infoseek, etc. have proven to be rich profit centers for their owners. That's because they offer advertisers a preselected list of customers.

Let's say, for example, that your company makes snowboards. You can shell out several tens of thousands of dollars for ads in magazines. Readers who see your ads may or may not be interested. But if you buy an ad on an Internet search engine, you are only paying to advertise to likely customers. The search engine can be programmed so that your snowboard ad only pops up when people ask for information about snowboarding, skiing, winter sports, or similar topics.

Since a search engine is a way - one of the few ways, so far - for an entrepreneur to make money on the Internet, the electronic navigators are proliferating, as more and more programmers try to build the killer search engine. There are so many search services now, in fact, that several companies are selling software to help you use them. We'll try out a couple of these programs and report in a later column whether any of them is worth the money.

T.R. Reid is Rocky Mountain bureau chief of the Washington Post. Brit Hume is managing editor of Fox News in Washington. You can reach them in care of the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St., Washington D.C. 20071-9200, or you can e-mail T.R. Reid at [e-mail], or Brit Hume at [e-mail].