Some of the lines on this devilish landscape appear to be straight and wide; others are narrow and curvy. There are dotted lines representing routes that are "under construction," and dashes that promise future paths to some informational Nirvana. Right now there are two main routes which Net explorers can take as they search for places to go and people to help. To paraphrase an old song: You can take the high road, or you can take the low road, and you'll get to Scotland eventually...or to New Orleans or Slovakia or wherever you wish to go.
The high roads are the fastest. They represent the big dedicated information indexes that provide the most direct routes to areas of general interest or, for our purposes, specific travel destinations. Some of the more popular Web catalogs or "search engines," as they are sometimes called, are Stanford University's Yahoo, Carnegie Mellon University's Lycos (or their new commercial domain), and the ever-popular Web Crawler.
The Whole Internet Catalog is another good choice even though its big, colorful home page loads a bit slowly on older modems.
At the time of this writing, Lycos was the largest and most full-featured of the group, being able to search a document's internal text as well as its title, and provide excellent, detailed reports. As a relative newcomer to the Net, however, I still lean toward Yahoo because of its simple, straightforward search methodology—one that has never failed to provide an ample overview of my desired travel destination.
To illustrate the simplest, most basic Web browsing technique, let's run through a typical travel-site search using Yahoo's home page as a starting point. Some Internet providers have included, as an integral feature of their Net navigators, "buttons" for two or three of the major search tools (including Yahoo). This being the case, a click on the "Yahoo" button will "jump" you directly to its home page. If there is no direct access button, look for "Open URL [Uniform Resource Locator]" on the menu bar or in the file menu, and enter Yahoo's Internet address in the dialog box.
Like all well-designed home pages, Yahoo's will load quickly even though its new, jazzier title graphic has been redesigned to look like a whimsical block print instead of conservative Roman lettering, and the jump buttons now resemble tiny slices of jelly roll. But forget the buttons for now. Forget the direct URL entry option, and ignore the "Keyword" dialog box which, incidentally, will eventually become your most useful search tool. For a quick and easy search of the catalog's travel resources, let's first consider only the blue, underlined "hypertext" headings which will send you to your selected subject with just one click of the mouse. Scrolling down the menu, the heading "Recreation" seems the obvious choice since it includes not only "Travel," but also "Theme Parks," "Sports" and several other subcategories that may yield helpful home pages. A click on "Travel" opens more subsites such as the expected "Resorts," "Lodgings," "Tours," etc., and also a "Specific Destinations" category which seems very promising indeed. Select that hypertext with another mouse-click, and (I always love this part) a grab bag of great getaways from Antarctica to Zambia magically unfolds on your computer screen. But wait! This is not the session to get too specific. Now that we know this travel bonanza exists, it's time to get back to broader categories—but not before "bookmarking" this site for future reference. To do this, find the "Add Bookmark" or "Add to Hot List" option in your navigator/browser menu (each will have its own name for this feature) and save the desired URL to your personal list of travel sites.
Before exiting the "Recreation" area, why not take a quick look at "Theme Parks." As you might expect, you will find home pages for Disneyland, Marine World and a variety of cultural centers, but you can also explore esoteric attractions such as "Merry-Go-Rounds" and "Roller Coasters." The lists goes on and on, winding up, naturally, with "Zoos." Moving right along, use the "Back" arrow or "Home" button on the menu bar at the top of the page to return to the Yahoo home page, and investigate the rather ambiguous "Regional" heading. Who could have guessed that you would be virtually transported to almost every country in the world, including the new-but-historic republic of Slovakia whose FAQ list on "Customs" reminds prospective visitors, "You have to pay for public restrooms. Drop 2 Sk in attendant's dish and take a strip of toilet paper. There's none inside." Bookmark this listing? I guess not.
Anything that remotely relates to travel is fair game on your cyberhunt, so don't pass up the hypertext heading "Culture" as a likely source of travel information. Once there, can you resist clicking on "Mardi Gras" to see how that annual bacchanal remotely resembles anything cultural? Actually, the tasteful New Orleans Mardi Gras Home Page with its colorful Jester symbol is a must for anyone planning to visit that venue in 1996.
Visitors to the site will find not only articles on the historical and, yes, cultural aspects of the event, but also valuable information on places to stay and schedules of major parades. As if that were not enough, one can even download sound bytes of typical festival music to help get attuned (pun intended) to the celebration.
Having located (and bookmarked) some of the better travel sites along the "Superhighway," it's time to explore a few of the lower and slower roads across the netscape. It's time to put away your guidebooks and maps and just meander. One of the first visits on an "electronic byway" should be to your own online service's search menu. If you should happen to be an America Online, Prodigy or CompuServe subscriber, crawl off the Web for a minute to see what they have to offer in their less extensive, but often revealing data bases. Take AOL's "Travel" section for example. A click on this main-menu button will load a list of common services like airline reservations, travel guides, and weather forecasts. Like most other commercial, online services AOL also supports several online travel magazines that furnish new, downloadable travel articles each month. A trick I use to locate related Web pages (which usually have more up-to-date information) is to find the "Search Back Issues" dialogue box, type in the unique character-string, "http," and any Web sites present in any article will be immediately listed. In Travel & Leisure Magazine, for example, an article on New Mexico includes the State's official Web address. Doesn't it follow that many states probably have the same Internet service? In Travel Holiday Magazine, a reference for Moon Handbooks lists over 50 travel guides for budget-minded travelers headed for Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the South Pacific. Can Frommer and Fodor be far behind?
Finally, don't forget to visit that vast Internet wilderness on the outskirts of Web-land. Thousands of newsgroups and FTP systems still maintain active message centers and data files and probably will for some time to come. An occasional side trip to Gopher, once the primary information organizer of the Net, can also provide a considerable amount of text-oriented travel data. More and more frequently, however, as we visit these back roads of cyberspace we find an apologetic message that probably predicts the multifaceted, multimedia future of the Internet: "Sorry, this database has been moved to the World Wide Web, at http://www..."