By Dan Boudreau

Search Engines.
Indexing the words on every page in their database, a search engine covers Web pages and can include billions of pages. Different search engines can bring different results.

Portals.
Offer search, directory, and many other general services such as email, free home page building, news and popular topics. Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN are popular portals.

Directories.
A subject directory includes selected websites and classifies them into hierarchical subject categories. Most portals have one and some specialized directories are available by themselves. They do not index every word on every page included.

Newsgroups.
Discussion forums organized around a particular interest, issue or activity. They can be used to share expertise, views, information, and to debate issues. Newsgroups can be a great source of technical information.

Archives.
Dated information or even complete websites can be accessed through sites such at www.faqs.org or www.archive.org.

Message Boards.
www.boardreader.com reads forums and message boards from more than 750,000 sites.

Blogs.
A short form for weblog, a personal journal published on the Web. Blogs often include philosophical reflections, opinions on the Internet and social issues, and provide a log of the author’s favorite web links. Blogs are usually presented in journal style with a new entry each day.

E-zines.
Sites such as LISTZ at www.tile.net host many e-zines, mailing lists and related information.

RSS Feeds.
RSS, an acronym for RDF Site Summary, is just another XML vocabulary. An RSS feed is an XML document conforming to the rules of that vocabulary and served up to a client program.

This article is part of Chapter 4 of Business Plan or BUST

You are welcome to publish this article providing you attach this statement with the link back to the RiskBuster website:

“Dan Boudreau is President and CEO of Macrolink Action Plans Inc. and the RiskBuster Business Plan Oasis at http://www.riskbuster.com Writing your own business plan can be easy, fast and fun! Instantly download a free copy of Dan’s popular fast-track business plan template, The Shell, when you subscribe to the RiskBuster Business Plan Insider at http://www.riskbuster.com”

 

 

The End