Insurance Companies & Resources on the Net (http://lattanze.loyola. edu/users/cwebb/insure.htm) This site lists the Web sites on the Internet that are related to insurance. These are primarily insurance company sites, but are not exclusively so. A helpful feature of this site is that it is alphabetically indexed so you don’t have to go through many screens to find a particular site listing. Its only real limitation (but it is a very significant one) is that it hasn’t been updated since February 4, 1996. Because, as noted above, the number of insurance and insurance-related companies with Web sites doubles every 53 days, there are about 256 times as many sites now (March 13, 1997) as there were when this site was last updated. However, it is still well worth checking. Hopefully, its developer, Chris Webb ([email protected]), will update it soon, as the beginning paragraph of this site promises.

Insurance News Network (http://www.insure.com) This Web site updates developments in automobile, life, and home insurance. It also includes information on annuities, state regulations, and company ratings, and has an insurance glossary. Like other general sites, this one also permits access to search engines. What is most important about this site is its recent news about events that affect insurance; in addition to summarizing the news, it also provides links to the selected story as well as retaining previous news stories and news releases. It is an excellent source for background material.

InsWeb (http://www.insweb.com) InsWeb is "the Internet gateway to the insurance industry." This Web site has information for both consumers and insurance/financial services professionals. It consists of three general sections. Consumer Information & Purchasing Center is, as its name implies, geared toward consumers. This section contains relevant news and events, general search utilities, research information, and survey information. In addition, it allows users to get instant quotes on the cost of insurance. It also has an agent locator, which helps consumers find insurance agents in their area who can meet their particular needs. Insurance Industry Center is aimed at meeting the needs of professionals. It has subsections in Life and Health Insurance, Property and Casualty Insurance, What’s New on InsWeb, information about and links to insurance companies, and a Weekly Tax Update. The third section is Career Center. This lists job opportunities in insurance and financial services. It is a good source for both the neophyte who is seeking to enter the field and the seasoned professional who is thinking about changing companies and/or locations.

LIFE: Life and Health Insurance Foundation for Education (http://www.life-line.org) LIFE is a Web site aimed primarily at providing information to consumers. It contains four general sections. Insurance 101 is an introduction to insurance concepts and terminology; it also covers the history of insurance. Life Calculators estimates how much insurance a person needs by asking a number of interactive questions. Health for Life provides a monthly digest of Internet sources that can help users maintain or improve their health and fitness. Users may subscribe to this digest, which is then sent to their e-mail address. Facts of Life includes information about LIFE—what it is and what it is attempting to do. One interesting feature of this site is its Life-Line Facts. A box on the first page shows the year-to-date payments made to policyholders by life insurance companies in the United States and Canada.

LIMRA (http://ww.limra.com) This Web site, which is available to anyone on the Internet⁶ provides news and information about LIMRA and the financial services field. Its first page includes a weekly update of events at LIMRA, in the industry, and on the Internet. It also contains sections on financial services careers and a sampler of its extensive database. One very interesting section, Hot Topic, lists resources in LIMRA’s database for conducting literature searches on special themes of interest in insurance and financial services. The "hot topic" changes weekly.

6. LIMRA also has a paid subscription line, LIMRA Online, which allows access to its extensive marketing research data.

LOMA (http://www.loma.org) LOMA’s Web site provides extensive information about the management and operations of life and health insurance and financial services companies. Its home page contains 15 sections, concentrating on its programs and designations, education, management, and operations. Of particular interest is the CyberTalk section. This part of LOMA’s Web site discusses developments by insurance and financial services companies on the Internet. In addition to its current topic of discussion, it has an archive of prior topics. This is a good place to look for information about how the Internet is being used in life and health insurance and financial services.

Money Personal Finance Center (http://www.moneypages.com/syndicate) This Web site, developed by the New York Times syndicate, deals with stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. It also has a current price index for stocks (although you must know a stock’s ticker name to get a quote). This Web site also has an extensive collection of financial links on the Internet. One very useful section is Broker’s Corner. It is specifically for stockbrokers and includes such diverse topics as CFP and CFA requirements, NASD licenses, trade magazines, information on government regulations and regulators, and marketing on the Internet.

National Association of Insurance Commissioners (http://www.naic.org/) This Web site is the place to find out about insurance regulations. It will inform you what NAIC is doing, including its committee activities, and provides an interactive map of the United States for a detailed description of the insurance commissioners (including pictures, phone numbers, and addresses). It also contains NAIC’s newsletters and news releases. Inquiries about state insurance regulations should begin here.

RISKWeb (http://www.riskweb.com/). This Web site, developed and maintained by Jim Garven, focuses on helping professionals and academics in the field of risk management and insurance. It contains a search engine on its front page drawing from eight general search engines (discussed below), 17 news sources, or 19 reference materials sources. In addition, RISKWeb presents an extensive listing of links to relevant resources in risk management. You can also subscribe to RISKNet by filling in an on-line bibliographic survey. This subscription will put you on RISKNet’s mailing list and, if you desire, it will enable you to receive an entire day’s messages in a single digest. The mailing list feature enables the user to join in a discussion group on risk management and insurance. Give this helpful and informative resource a try. If you find that it isn’t what you want, you can easily unsubscribe to it.

Society for Insurance Research (http://connectyou.com/sir/) This Web site provides rapid access to insurance research abstracts by author and by subject. It must be noted, however, that the articles are only available by purchasing them either through LEXIS/NEXIS or through SIR. For this reason, this site is probably best used to supplement other information or as a source when the information sought cannot be found anywhere else. This Web site also has an insurance career center that allows job seekers to post and edit their resume on-line and search for jobs. Employers can post jobs and search through candidates’ on-line resumes. In addition, this site has a good listing of links of insurance-related home pages, broken down by topic.

Up to this point, 18 different Web sites of special interest to professionals in insurance and financial services have been examined. Perhaps you think that this covers the entire gamut of relevant Internet sites in these areas. Think again: These sites are only about 7/100 of one percent of Internet Web sites on insurance and financial services. How do you find the Web sites you want? The next section addresses this.

General Search Procedures

Because the Internet is so vast and contains such a wide array of information, it can be quite intimidating. The previous section gave brief sketches of some sites which may or may not provide users with exactly what they’re looking for. There are at least 30 million pages on the World Wide Web; Usenet and Gopher probably double that number. How is one to dig through all of this information to find some that is useful and relevant?

Fortunately, the answer lies in search engines. These special World Wide Web sites enable the user to find documents on the Internet (and sometimes elsewhere) that address specified topics, phrases, or subjects. The Internet includes a large number of different search engines, but only a select few have gained dominance. Two of these, Alta Vista and Excite, will be covered in detail below. However, some general information about search engines and how to conduct specific searches will be discussed first.

There are two types of search engines: category-based and indexed. A category-based search engine has general areas of information, such as business, humor, computers, and so on. You select one of these categories and are presented with another set of subcategories for the one selected. For example, if you picked business, the subcategories might be stock market, transportation, health care, insurance, financial services, and so forth. The subcategory selected would lead to more sub-fields, each related to the one selected. The selection of fields continues until you find the Web sites you are looking for. In other words, the user follows a tree-like hierarchy that becomes more and more defined until he or she arrives at the Web sites that fulfill the criteria of interest.

Category-based search engines utilize reviews of Web sites that define how those sites should be categorized. Because they require defining reviews, these search engines have a smaller number of usable links. They may also be somewhat dated, depending on how many reviewers they have. They do, however, include more detailed analyses of the documents and Web sites contained within their tree structures. They are good sources for detailed and in-depth information about well-established sites and can be efficient starting points for a search. However, remember that they may be dated in their reviews and may not include new or recently revised sites.

An indexed search engine, on the other hand, is not bounded by the need to have sites defined and cross-referenced. This type of searcher takes a word or words you enter in the search box and seeks out Web sites that contain those search words. Alta Vista and Excite are indexed search engines. In effect, this type of search engine can find anything on the Internet. Some engines search only World Wide Web sites. Some let you choose what to search—for example, World Wide Web, Newsgroups, or Usenet classified ads. Some will search non-Internet sites. As a rule, however, the latter sites do not allow free access to their information. You must pay to access it—perhaps $1 to download a particular paper from a non-Internet site. Generally, the information from these sources is not available anywhere else.

Indexed search engines are best used either for searches that require access to the entire Internet (or its components) or to find answers to questions that cannot be categorized easily. As is to be expected with something that searches through millions of documents and billions of words, it takes some skill to tell the indexed search engines how to find precisely what you are looking for. Before considering specific search engines, some general rules of indexed searching will be discussed.

Be sure of your spelling; the Internet is quite literal and unforgiving. A simple misspelling can take you on a lengthy detour to places you’re not looking for. Before launching a search, check to see that what you’ve put in the search box is what you want it to be.

Search engines can be case sensitive. As a rule, unless you know that what you are looking for is capitalized, use lowercase letters. This will return both uppercase and lowercase letters. Be prepared, however, to get more (sometimes a lot more) results this way. For example, an Alta Vista search for "The American College" (quotation marks will be discussed below) finds 700 documents. Exactly the same search in lowercase and without quotation marks finds over one million documents. The first search done with Excite finds 3,807 documents; the second search finds 3,285,720 documents. Despite these massive returns, use lowercase rather than uppercase. In a preliminary search, it is better to start big and whittle down to specifics.

One very worthwhile feature of both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer which is related to searches is Bookmarks. This feature allows you to "tag" a Web site and create a link from your computer to the site just by clicking a headline. For example, if you were using Netscape Navigator and wanted to get to The American College home page any time, you would enter http://www.amercoll.edu in the link box of Netscape. When the College’s home page was displayed, you could click Bookmarks, then Add to Bookmarks. From that point on, when you press Bookmarks, a list of sites you want to access quickly is displayed. To get to one of these sites, highlight that site and double click the mouse button. You’ll be automatically transported to that Web site.

Finally, use the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle whenever possible. Simplicity will help you find what you want more quickly. Do not use complex (not to be confused with advanced) searches when simple ones will do.

Search Engines: Alta Vista and Excite

Two search engines will be explored here: Alta Vista and Excite. There are many others. (The All-In-One Web site lists all known search engines.) Alta Vista and Excite have been selected because they provide the largest amount of information and are the fastest searchers available. When you become comfortable with the Internet, experiment with different search engines and select the one(s) that best suit your needs. See the Appendix of this chapter for a listing of other search engines.

Alta Vista, Latin for "high view" or "to see high or far," is debatably the fastest of the search engines. Depending upon how busy the Internet is, Alta Vista can conduct a search through millions of Web sites in a short period (usually no more than one minute).

Alta Vista has two types of searches, simple and advanced. The simple search utilizes a word or words and finds out where they appear on Web sites throughout the Internet. Once its search is completed, it reports the results—with titles, link, and description—to your screen. Alta Vista reports how many sites it found in the search and then presents them in sets of ten. (It tends to use round numbers, rather than an exact count, when it gets a lot of "hits" in a search.)

Simple searches can contain a single word, several words, and/or phrases. When Alta Vista sees a group of words separated by white spaces, it understands that one or more of these words is the focus of the search. In other words, in a simple search, the use of the words insurance financial services would return any Web sites with the word "insurance" and/or "financial" and/or "services" within it. This is called the default OR operator. The Web sites the search finds are sorted by the frequency of occurrences of the search words, so sites containing all three words would come first, sites with two of the search words would come next, and sites with only one search word would come last. Alta Vista reads the terms from left to right, so sites containing the word "insurance" would come before "financial" and "services," "financial" would be next, then "services."

Needless to say, Alta Vista’s assumption of OR between search words can lead to excessively large results. Fortunately, there are ways to define how you would like search terms to be treated. This is known as gluing words together. The easiest way is to put a specific phrase in quotes. For example, if you wanted to perform a search for financial services, list "financial services" as the search term. This tells Alta Vista that the results must contain the entire term "financial services," not just "financial" and/or "services," as in the previous example.

Another useful device is the plus sign (+). This indicates that a word must be in the document found in the search. For example, the search terms +insurance "financial services" would tell Alta Vista that the word "insurance" must be in the document found and that the term "financial services" is desired, but not necessary (the OR assumption). If "+" was put ahead of "financial services" in this search, it would mean both the terms "insurance" and "financial services" must appear in the document.

The opposite of this is the minus sign (–). Its inclusion before a word in a search tells Alta Vista that this word or term must not appear in the document. For example, suppose you wanted to conduct a search on all kinds of life insurance except term insurance. You would specify "life insurance" –term. This would return all documents containing the term "life insurance" but would exclude any that include the word "term."

Another useful feature of Alta Vista simple searches is the wild card (*). This lets the user specify only parts of a search word. It is useful when there are spelling variations of a word (for example, "colo*r" would yield "color" and "colour"; "cantalo*" would yield "cantaloup," "cantaloupe," and "cantalope"). The wild card is also useful when you want a search to include plurals of a word without writing them out (for example, "qualit*" would yield "quality" and "qualities") or when you aren’t sure of the spelling of a word (for example, "alumin*" would produce documents with the American aluminum and the British aluminium).

The wild card has some limitations. It cannot be used at the beginning of a word and must have at least three letters ahead of it. It will match from zero to five letters, in lowercase only. In other words, a search for the word "cas*" would find documents containing the words "case," "casing," "casket," and "cashier." It would not, however, find documents containing "cassette" or "castanets." Along this same line, the use of "*" can create too many matches. This will cause Alta Vista to ignore the search and return the result: No documents match this query.

An advanced search in Alta Vista is quite different from a simple search. It employs full Boolean search features. A Boolean search allows the user to give exact specifications of what is to be found. In addition, it allows the user to stipulate how the results of the search will be ranked. A Boolean search is a much easier way to generate links that are much closer to the search term.

Unlike simple searches, advanced searches require binary operators AND, OR, and NOT to glue words and phrases together. The +, –, and white spacing of the simple search do not apply here. Quotation marks, however, can be used in the same way.

One feature of these operators which is not available in a simple search is NEAR. This option is like AND, which specifies that the two words connected by it must both appear in a document. NEAR specifies that the words must appear within ten words of each other. This helps avoid the search turning up documents that coincidentally contain the cited words.

Another helpful feature of advanced search is the use of parentheses. In Boolean operations like computer programming, parentheses enable the user to give exacting specifications of what is being looked for in the search. For example, if you wanted to find growth or balanced mutual funds related to life insurance or health insurance, you could specify "mutual funds" AND (growth OR balanced) NEAR (life OR health) AND (insurance). This would ensure that you’d find the results you were looking for in your search.

Both simple and advanced searches in Alta Vista have extensive Help sections. To view the Help section in a simple search, click the right mouse button at the top of the Alta Vista screen. To get help for an advanced search, first click the Advanced button (second from the left on the Alta Vista screen).then click the Help button. Alta Vista, especially the advanced search, takes some getting used to, particularly if the user has no experience in programming. However, it is well worth the time spent learning it.

Another very useful search engine is Excite. This engine accesses over 50 million pages on the Internet. It is said that if you can’t find it on Excite, it isn’t on the Internet. Excite can be used for category-based searches or indexed searches; the indexed searches can be done with or without Boolean operators. In addition, the user may select which database to search. Excite allows the choice of World Wide Web, Web Site Reviews (category-based), Usenet Newsgroups, and Usenet Classified advertisements.⁷ Excite searches utilize the same operations as previously discussed under Alta Vista, except the NEAR operator, which is not available.

7. Alta Vista also allows the search of Newsgroups (Usenet). You must select this option before entering the words to search in the box. Alta Vista automatically defaults to searching the Internet World Wide Web.

One very useful feature of Excite is the More Like This option. This phrase appears to the right of each title listed in the search results. If you find that a particular document is especially what you are looking for, click on More Like This. Excite will conduct another search using the document as an example. This will help you find documents and Internet links that more exactly match with what you are looking for.

Excite also has a Sort By Site feature. This will list results by the Web site in which they are contained. Sort By Site defines results more tightly and limits the number of times the same site will appear as the result of a search.

Excite also has an advanced search feature, although it is not nearly as sophisticated as the one in Alta Vista. Actually, the Excite advanced search enables the use of the "+" sign for words a document must contain and a "–" sign for words it must not contain. It also allows the use of Boolean operators.

Both Excite and Alta Vista will open the door for you when you decide to journey beyond a few known and specified Web sites, like those mentioned in the previous section of this chapter. In effect, Alta Vista and Excite make the entire Internet available to you. Where you go, what you see, and how you use it is up to you.

Go Forth and Ride

Don’t think of the Internet as a train that already left the station and you need to catch up with it. Think of it as an conveyor belt that’s always moving and can get you from one place to another more quickly.

In this chapter, you have been shown where this conveyor belt is, how it operates, where to get on it, what some of its stops are, and how to find more. Enjoy your trip!

Where Can I Find Out More?

• Robert M. Baranoff. "The Net Benefit." LIMRA’s Marketfacts (July/August 1996), pp. 23–27.
• S.A. Batman. Financial Planning in Cyberspace: The New Frontiers for Practice Management and Client Service. 1996.
• Katie Hafner. "Look Who’s Talking." Newsweek (February 17, 1997), pp. 70–72.
• Gregory Krohm. "A Survey of Insurance Industry and Regulatory Applications on the Internet." Journal of Insurance Regulation, Vol.14, No.4 (Summer 1996), pp. 518–548.
• S.L. Nelson. Field Guide to the Internet. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1995.

CHAPTER 12 APPENDIX
SELECTED WEB SITES