WebWatch is the co-operative effort of two of Phnom Penh's most experienced Internet

users:

David Lewis, of Telstra's Bigpond, and Bill Herod, information technology

consultant at the NGO Forum on Cambodia. Contact through: [email protected]

Search engines just keep getting better. Just a few months ago, an Internet user

had to map out a search strategy in order to avoid being presented with millions

of useless documents.

Now, search engines are becoming "smarter". Using a Google or Fast, for

example, you can simply type in several key words and phrases and quickly access

a list of relevant documents.

Google (the search engine now used by Yahoo!) even has a toolbar you can download

(free) and add to your browser. The Google toolbar will find your search terms, highlight

them in the documents (different colors for different terms) and enable you to easily

jump to the specific words you searched for (by allowing you to click on each of

your search terms from the tool-bar).

In some sites, you can even search within the site directly from the Google toolbar

without having to switch to a different program. The Google toolbar is especially

useful for complex searches where multiple search terms are used.

In search of Montagnards

The 24 individuals who recently entered Cambodia fromVietnam are members of ethnic

minority groups from Vietnam's central highlands. These groups are often collectively

known as Montagnards. The many different tribal groups are ethnically, socially,

culturally and linguistically distinct from the majority population and from each

other.

There is a great deal of information on the Internet about these groups, especially

about their decades of struggle to maintain control of their traditional homelands

and to retain their cultural identity. The term Fulro (from a French acronym meaning

the Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races) is frequently used to refer to this

resistance to outside control, whether organized or spontaneous. For information,

use any search engine to find "Montagnards", "Fulro" or search

for the names of individual tribes (e.g. Jarai, Bahnar, Koho, etc). To narrow your

search, add the word "Vietnam"

iHarvest

If you have ever had the experience of noting the Internet address of an interesting

page, then returning to it later only to find it had been deleted or moved, help

is here! A web site called iHarvest will make a copy of any page you want to save

and safely store it for you for future reference. Free registration at iHarvest will

give you 10MB of on line storage (enough for 100-150 web pages). You can file pages

in topical folders for easy retrieval. You can even link to such stored pages from

your own web site, eliminating the problem of "dead links". The site has

a toolbar you can download for easy integration with your browser, or you can simply

log into the web site and navigate from there.

Site seeing

Visit the new web sites of the Coffel (Coalition for Free andFair Elections) and

Adhoc (see addresses below).

Links

Featured search engines

Fast search engine: www.alltheweb.com

Google search engine: www.google.com

Google toolbar: www.google.com/options/toolbar.html

Montagnard information:

Save The Montagnards - www.montagnards.org

Montagnard Foundation, Inc: www.montagnardfoundation.org

Montagnard Dega Association (not current): www.angelfire. com/mo/mdadega.

iHarvest: www.iharvest.com

Site Seeing:

Adhoc: www.bigpond.com.kh/users/adhoc

Coffel: www.bigpond.com.kh/users/coffel