How to find what you're looking for on the internet
What are you really searching?
Types of search tools currently available
Where should I begin?
What other tools exist to find information through the Internet?
Finding the Web documents (a.k.a. Web "pages" or "sites") you want can be easy or seem impossibly difficult. This is in part due to the sheer size of the WWW, currently estimated to contain 3 billion documents. It is also because the WWW is not indexed in any standard vocabulary. Unlike a library's catalogs, in which can use standardized Library of Congress subject headings to find books in most large, general libraries in the U.S., in Web searching you are always guessing what words will be in the pages you want to find or guessing what subject terms were chosen by someone to organize a web page or site covering some topic.
When you do what is called "searching the Web," you are NOT searching it directly. It is not possible to search the WWW directly. The Web is the totality of the many web pages which reside on computers (called "servers") all over the world. Your computer cannot find or go to them all directly. What you are able to do through your computer is access one or more of many intermediate search tools available now. You search a search tool's database or collection of sites -- a relatively small subset of the entire World Wide Web. The search tool provides you with hypertext links with URL s to other pages. You click on these links, and retrieve documents, images, sound, and more from individual servers around the world.
There is no way for anyone to search the entire Web, and any search tool that claims that it offers it all to you is distorting the truth.
Return to Top
At present, we find it useful to describe the kinds of intermediate search tools available to you in four categories. You use different strategies to find and exploit the potential of the tools in each class:
| Types of Search Tools |
Characteristics |
Examples |
| Search Engines (& Meta-Search Engines) |
- Full-text of selected Web pages
- Search by keyword, trying to match exactly the words in the pages
- No browsing, no subject categories
- Databases compiled by "spiders" (computer-robot programs) with minimal human oversight
- Search-Engine size: from small and specialized to 90+ percent of the indexable Web
- Meta-Search Engines quickly and superficially search several individual search engines at once and return results compiled into a sometimes convenient format. Caveat: They only catch about 10% of search results in any of the search engines they visit.
|
- Search Engines recommended and described in this tutorial: Google, Alta Vista Advanced Search, Northern Light Power Search, Alltheweb
- Meta-Search Engines: Metacrawler, Ixquick, Copernic, and others
|
| Subject Directories |
- Human-selected sites picked by editors (sometimes experts in a subject)
- Often carefully evaluated and kept up to date, but not always -- frequently not if large and general
- Usually organized into hierarchical subject categories
- Often annotated with descriptions (not in Yahoo!)
- Can browse subject categories or search using broad, general terms
- NO full-text of documents . Searches need to be less specific than in search engines, because you are not matching on the words in the pages you eventually want. In Directories you are searching only the subject categories and descriptions you see in its pages.
|
- Recommended and described in this tutorial: Librarians' Index, Infomine, Yahoo!, About.com, AcademicInfo
- There are thousand more of Subject Directories on practically every topic you can think of.
|
| Specialized Databases (The Invisible Web) |
- The Web provides access through a search box into the contents of a database in a computer somewhere
- Can be on any topic, can be trivial, commercial, task-specific, or a rich treasure devoted to your topic
|
- Locate specialized databases by looking for them in good Subject Directories like the Librarian's Index, Yahoo!, or AcademicInfo; in special guides to searchable databases; and sometimes by keyword searching in general search engines
|
Return to Top
We recommend beginning with different types of search tools, depending on what you know about your topic and what you want to know. Do you want broad information? Are you looking for something very specific or perhaps a unique term or phrase? Are you looking for a narrow aspect of a topic with a huge Web presence? When you search, are you overwhelmed by too many or off-target results? Are there a lot of synomyms of equivalent terms for what you seek? Each of these questions can give you a clue where to begin.
Follow this link to Recommended Search Strategies Page . Or this one to our Recommended Search Tools . In both, we encourage you to vary your search strategy and learn as you search, choosing the optimal approach for each stage of the process. Finding information on the Web is a process.
Return to Top
If you have exhausted the options above, you may want to ask someone through an online discussion forum. If you are seeking international information, you may want to search the Web within the country or countries you want (often you need to know the language).
Return to Top |
