The wonderful world of the Web.

• Author: Gordon, Dianna
• Position: Internet coverage of legislative sessions - Includes related article on five legislatures Web sites reaching the top 5% in different categories

It's like wonderland there inside your computer, and here's how to get at some of its mysteries.

Maybe the abbreviation WWW really stands for Wealth of Worldwide Wisdom instead of World Wide Web.

The Web is a treasure trove of useful and fascinating information, but it should always be used with this disclaimer: Anyone can say anything on the Web. It's the last electronic frontier, and site content ranges from the Internet's roots as a corridor for academic and military information to the world's largest gossip center. Where else could you find the White House, Pentagon, CIA and Washington Post home pages at your fingertips, then click in to the latest conspiracy theories about who killed JFK? You can find reams of electronic pages on UFOs and the occult. But that's balanced with such erudite offerings as the Cornell Law School pages of constitutions, statutes and codes for the federal government and states at http://www.law.cornell.edu/statutes.html.

So, hang on to your seats, because we're about to take an electronic ride to just a minuscule number of the multitude of fascinating sites offered by the World Wide Web - from silly to profound, useful to entertaining.

USEFUL

Perhaps the most useful sites are those of search engines, those trusty computer slaves that find what we're looking for. Most Web users are familiar with Yahoo, Alta Vista, Infoseek and others. But there are some multi-engine search vehicles out in cyberland that are inordinately useful.

One of the most powerful is Dogpile, which hits 25 different search engines, including Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek and 22 others simultaneously, as well as conducting usenet, FTP and news wire searches. The service is free and user friendly at www.dogpile.com.

Along the same lines, Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.com) is a better search vehicle for anyone not sure how to phrase or narrow a search. The site can translate "plain English" and steps a user through the search process.

The easiest Web site finder that searches other Web finders, according to one NCSL staffer, is found at www.metacrawler.com/.

A third option? HumanSearch at www.humansearch.com with "real live humans" to answer your questions. The disadvantage is that it is a service staffed by volunteers and requires two business days to give you an answer. An advantage is that humans are the best at "fuzzy logic," that intuitive leap that can provide the answers a linear programmed machine cannot.

DRY, BUT VALUABLE

In the day-to-day world of policymaking, information from other states and regions can prove invaluable. One of the quicker ways to have such information at your fingertips is through www.piperinfo.com/state/states.html. The Piper resources guide to government-sponsored Internet sites features links to all 50 states, tribal governments, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Multistate sites include the Appalachian Regional Commission, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Multistate Tax Commission, among others.

The Census Bureau and the Internet Law Library links are available along with other federal sites; and the national organizations list can take you directly to the pages of the National Association of Counties, the State Services Organization, the American Planning Association and also includes state transportation officials, city and county managers, state art agencies, regional councils and a multitude of others. And of course, most valuable of all are the legislative sites you...