NEWSGROUPS TIPS

Newsgroups are global bulletin boards on every topic you can think of ... and what better resource is there than people writing about what they know? If you want to find people buying and selling baseball cards, there's a newsgroup made for you. The same thing goes for personal ads, stop-smoking support groups, and more. Whether you've got specific questions, or just want to chew the fat, all you have to do is get to the right newsgroup. So, we've put together some points for finding what you need in newsgroups, as well as rules of the road that will help you get along.

Ten Quick Tips for Using Search Newsgroups

Finding newsgroup articles To find newsgroup articles (the actual messages that people write and post), just type words describing what you're looking for and click the Find button. To find newsgroups (the places, arranged by category, to find those articles), first click the button that says "newsgroup descriptions," type what you want, and then click Find. Don't worry about AND When you type in multiple words, AOL NetFind will find articles with all of those words. By typing in more than one word and being more specific, you can focus in on the newsgroup articles that interest you. Use OR to find any of the words you type in For example, to find articles with the word cat or dog, type in cats OR dogs. Use NOT to cut out articles you don't want to see If you want to find articles about pets, but don't want to see articles about dogs, type in pets NOT dogs. Use quotes to find phrases If you want to find a phrase, type the words exactly as you want to see them, and put them in quotes. So, to find the phrase raining cats and dogs, type "raining cats and dogs". Use Advanced Newsgroup Finder to customize your find and results options. You can adjust the number of articles you want to see on the results page, choose between current and older articles, and fiddle with the order in which articles are presented to you. Don't worry about capitalization Do pay attention to spelling. Be Wild Use "wildcards" at the ends of your words to expand your search. For example, say you wanted to find articles about boats, boating, and boathooks. Type boat* and click Find. The * (asterisk) tells AOL NetFind to look for articles with words that begin with boat, and end with anything. (You can also use the ? [question mark] to match single characters: typing bas? will look for words that start with "bas" and end in any letter, and will return words like bash, base, bass, etc.) Find out about the author When you get your Search Newsgroups results, clicking on the article name will show you the article. Clicking on the author's name will show you a profile of what he or she has posted to newsgroups.