Two ways of finding information about Indonesia on the Internet, and two new bazaars for the thousands of Web sites mushrooming in that country.

There's so much good stuff on the Internet, but how do you find it? An urgent question, also in Indonesia. In principle it should be easy since every word of every text on the Internet can be indexed by computer. Unfortunately it's not yet as simple as it should be.

Boolean

One problem is that putting a keyword into the 'search engine' often yields too much! How about combining several Keywords? Yes. Trouble is, the search engine then can't be sure whether you want documents that have both these words, or either one of them. This is where the Boolean operator comes in. It sounds like an African rhythm, but Boolean operators are actually a small set of powerful little words: 'and', 'or', 'not' and 'adj'.

Some other time we'll talk about scouring the entire World Wide Web with search engines. For now, let's try using Boolean operators with the reg-indonesia archives (found as always ongopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:2998/7REG-INDONESIA).

I wanted to find out what the army (Abri) has said about the free labour union SBSI in 1996. When I entered 'SBSI' as the search term (or 'sbsi', it's not case sensitive), I got 350 items. Too much!

This is where the Boolean operator comes in. By changing the search term to 'sbsi and abri', I reduced the number to 114. I nearly halved it again with 'sbsi and abri and 1996', since the date that occurs in every item is treated as an ordinary word. The end result still contained irrelevant material, but it was better than wading through 350 items.

With ingenuity, and knowledge of things like parentheses and the 'adj' operator (joining two words that should be adjacent), you can get closer still.

But what if you only want to read predigested stuff on Indonesia, and none except in English? For that, I recommend the UnCover database in the US. UnCover is a commercial service that keeps track of countless magazines and journals. For a small fee they can keep you posted on any topic you nominate. For a lot more they will fax you what you want. However, without paying a cent you may also search their database of 7 million items, and then look up what you found in a library near you.

UnCover are at http://www.carl.org/uncover. Unlike the reg-indonesia database, their magazine database only indexes the title and some other key words. So 'sbsi' yielded me nothing. However, with the search term 'labor indonesia' I got 33 references from recent years. The implied operator between 'labor' (American spelling!) and 'indonesia' was 'and'.

Early in 1996 I mentioned the Indonesian Internet bazaar at the University of Manitoba (http://www.umanitoba.ca/indonesia/homepage.html). Things have moved along since then, and now there are two even better bazaars in Indonesia itself. They are BATAVIANet onhttp://www.batavianet.com/links, and Indocenter onhttp://www.indocenter.com.

BataviaNet has links to 2000 homepages in Indonesia and growing. Indocenter may have a similar number, and seems to be visited more often. Both (they overlap a lot) range over almost any imaginable human activity. Including (my favourite) many newspapers and magazines....

Their latest offering is IndoExchange, bringing you live data from Indonesia's Stock Exchange. By registering with them (athttp://www.indoexchange.com, costs nothing) you can get the information you need to buy a slice of the action (or to monitor it), be it Bimantara or Lippo Bank. Your browser must have bells and whistles - at least Netscape 3.0 or Explorer 3.0.

Gerry van Klinken