Historical:Find solutions (where to)

Where you can find solutions in general.

= The Problem = We just want to know how to find solutions.

The solution must be simple and point directly into some useful directions. As always, more detailed information can be added to either Wikipedia or to a new Wikibook. All links must help the solution. (contrary to Wikipedia principles)

Motivation
People often are feeling lost when they don't have enough information. On the contrary, when they have too much information they feel incapable to process all that information.

The result is many psychological studies worldwide try to prove that people using internet/email/blogs/etc see their IQ decreasing in time. As the author of HowTo, i think this is due to the fact they become unmotivated and in time will try to think less in order to process more. We don't want everyone to process all the information, especially people that are sometimes called newbies by the community.

= The Solution =

Description
In order to find a solution you should identify your problem and then go to the corresponding page that will help you depending on the problem. Since HowTo is more about software for now, we cannot help you a lot with non-software problems.

You can use this page if you don't find a good solution on HowTo, or if you would like to investigate more because the answers here may be not neutral enough for you.

If you do so, it means you will spend time. Please come back and publish your results in 5% of the time you spent searching. We can then maybe integrate it in HowTo so that the next time people will be satisfied with only HowTo.

For internet users: Organized content

 * Content specially created
 * Your first source for solutions should be HowTo.
 * Try other Wikibooks and Wikipedia in different languages.
 * Try answers.com, it has a selection of sources
 * Even is the content is not free (over 50% of its topic-sites in 2002 were eliminated and information on those sites is no longer accessible to the general public), About.com, the so-called Human Internet, is still ranked hight in Alexa.
 * Social systems
 * They use labels to identify content. This new technology is far superior to just indexing
 * Technorati this is an advanced social system where you can find blogs that may have the solution to your problem.
 * Feed me links shares your bookmarks. It uses Free Software so your bookmarks will be yours...
 * del.icio.us or Delicious. The same principle, with only difference that the software used in not Free Software. It was included here because you still can import/export your bookmarks so you are not completely trapped if you make regular backups.

For internet users: Computer-generated only

 * Indexing sites
 * This sites only index and you can broe them
 * Open Directory Project a lot of information, almost free. This is the first choice.
 * Google dirctories popular also
 * Yahoo directory popular also
 * Searching sites
 * This sites also index, but you can search them
 * Google is the leading company in searching technology.
 * Yahoo search since 2004 Yahoo is generating its own results. Before that they were bought from Google.
 * Special searching
 * A9 can help you search in different places, it can be customized. It is based on many other searching engines, actually all results are generated from other sites like google, alexa, amazon, Wikipedia, imdb, etc...
 * Alexa is the interesting to find sites depending on their traffic. It can show the load in time and statistics on each site.

For internet users: Public personal help

 * Public forums blogs or lists
 * Google groups Is very popular.
 * Public IRC chat rooms
 * Many public IRC chat rooms exists, where you can get personal live responses but, like for the public forums and unlike blogs, there is no really good place to find all of them yet.

For offline users: Manuals and e-books

 * Well, without internet, it should be possible to obtain them, but there is no correct answer for such general question.

For non-computer users

 * Ask your friends :)
 * Go to a library
 * Look into a dictionary/encyclopedia (paper-based)
 * Travel or do research by yourself (use only when you don't have other solutions)

= Other pages =

Related HowTos

 * Where to find Free Software and Open Source software.

= Clarifications and Comments =

Final notes
Don't expect to find here specific solutions, we just link to general-purpose sites. This is required in order to be a practical guide.

This article is not yet finished, we need more feedback.

May also be

 * List here possible candidates. After discussion on the discussion page they may be included in the official list. If this hapends some of the entries in the official list may come here in order to keep the list not too big.
 * Frassle Based on Free Software started 09/2004 it includes blogging, external feeds and bookmarks, as well as better structuring the labels. However it is still alpha so it is not fully usable yet.
 * Ask Jeeves is an independent company (i think), but has not yet proved to be better than the other alternatives. Need more feedback on this one.
 * aspseek and aspstreet directory are build partially on Free Software. It has more relevant pages because only related to Application Service Providers web pages.
 * AllTheWeb to consider also.

Excluded

 * Altavista is part of Yahoo now, there is no need to mention it also as they share results.
 * MSN search This new service received more publicity than it should have. There it serious doubt wether this service is discriminating against Free Software related sites.

Clarifications

 * Here will be some information to help you understand in what way this article was subjective in order to stay practical.
 * This selection is promoting Free Software where your information is involved in order to protect you and the community as requested by the guidelines of HowTo. However this is done only when possible.

Category:HowTos