When you say search engine, most people think Yahoo. Though it might be one of the most popular search engines, it’s not necessarily the best.

According to Stephen Rose, a senior instructor with New Horizons, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the world’s largest computer training corporation, Yahoo.com only finds about 3 to 5 percent of all the pages on the Web.

As of Jan. 1, 2001, there were 3.1 billion Web pages worldwide, Rose says, adding that U.S. domains, which include .com, .edu, .net and .org, make up 1.5 billion of those pages. “Trying to find what you want out of this many pages can be pretty intimidating,” he says.

Though the Web’s size is intimidating, Rose says the biggest searching problem is that people are too vague or too specific and are not willing to take the time to focus on their search.

Putting Engines To Work

Search engines work in one of two ways, either through paid registration or with a technology called spiders, Rose explains.

When a Web page is created it must be registered with a search engine like Yahoo. The page’s owner must then submit 50 key words for that page to Yahoo, which adds those words to its database.

“When you search Yahoo, Lycos, Excite or Altavista, you’re searching their databases. You may use those search engines and walk away with totally different responses to what you’re looking for,” Rose explains.

He believes the best search engine out there today is Google (www.google.com). “Google searches 87…