There are many avenues open when searching for something particular. Remember you can also use the web search engines and that some, like
can also search usenet news.Also remember that Dejanews is a dedicated news searcher that keeps a news spool from early 1995 and onwards.
Even though more and more things take place of the web these days, do
not forget that there is a lot of information available on the various
ftp servers around the world. Some web search engines also index ftp
servers but the tool of choice is still the archie servers, systems
that regularly scan major ftp servers around the world and keep lists
of files. These can be accessed in many ways, either by archie clients
like archie or the X11 version xarchie which should be
available on any well maintained linux system. Failing that you can
access archie servers using telnet to any of the servers listed
Of course you should try to use the server closest to you, and to see the list of current server you can either start the archie client with no arguments or, if telnetting, by querying the server. Online help is available. Unfortunately not all servers are synchronised, so you might have to search a few before finding what you are looking for.
Recently a more user friendly ftp index server entered the net, the ftpsearch engine, featuring many options and with a rather stark interface, in the best Unix tradition.
Most of these offer help on efficient searching techniques, reading this can speed up your searches enormously. Investing a little time here will pay off in the long run.
If you have trouble getting onto the Internet but have mail then you should have a look at the access via mail FAQ. Naturally you can get it over e-mail using the US, Canada and South America server entering only this line in the BODY of the note:
/send usenet/news.answers/internet-services/access-via-email
or Europe, Asia etc server entering only this line in the BODY of the note:
send lis-iis e-access-inet.txt
or look through your news spool if you have one locally in news.answers newsgroup.
Finally, you might wish to get more information from a person, say an author of a software package. usually you can find the e-mail address in the accompanying documentation which normally would be in the documentation subdirectory but failing that and also if the given address is no longer valid you could find help in the FAQ for finding e-mail addresses.