Web Searching
Before You Start
While the quantity of information available over the Internet is extensive, the quality of that information varies considerably. It is important to know what types of resources are available on the Internet and what types are not. Typically, resources such as magazine and journal articles are not freely available to the general researcher. For research papers, controlled databases available in the library such as MasterFile and Britannica will yield considerably better results. Finally, it is important to evaluate any information taken from an Internet source since virtually anyone, regardless of their background and knowledge, can create and post documents to the Web.
Subject Directories
- When you have a broad topic or idea to research
- When you want to see a list of sites on your topic often recommended and annotated by experts
- When you want to retrieve a list of sites relevant to your topic, rather than numerous individual pages contained within these sites
- When you want to avoid viewing low-content documents that often turn up in search services
- Some subject directories include:
Search Engines
- When you have a narrow or obscure topic or idea to research
- When you are looking for a specific site
- When you want to search the full text of millions of pages
- When you want to retrieve a large number of documents on your topic
- When you want to search for particular types of documents, file types, source locations, languages, dates last modified, etc.
- When you want to take advantage of newer retrieval technologies such as concept clustering, ranking by popularity, link ranking, etc
- Some search services include:
Meta Search Engines
- Sites that search multiple search engines simultaneously
- Some meta search engines include:
Helpful Tips
- The following tips can be used in most of the popular search engines.
- A simple and powerful searching technique for locating Internet resources utilizes the plus and minus (-) signs which are known as implied Boolean operators.
- When searching, if a plus sign (+) is placed directly in front of a word it will force the search engine to return only those documents that have that specific word. Example: +"global warming" +environment +science
- If a minus sign (-) is placed directly in front of a search word, it will tell the search engine NOT to return any documents containing that particular word. Example: +pollution +water -air
- When searching for phrases, place the words in quotation marks as shown in the first example.