The Internet

Search Strategies

• Some tips for searching
  • Identify the search topic (or subject). Ask yourself:
    • What kind of information you are looking for, are you searching
      • for a broad subject to get everything available?
      • for a very well defined topic, name or title?
        1. do you know if the information is already published; when was it published?
        2. was it published in electronic format (in a Web page, FTP file, Gopher file, on a Usenet archive, etc.), or in print format (in a book, magazine, conference report, etc.) but also has a digital copy on the Internet?
        3. what other information do you know (author, title, publisher, company name, organization, technical term, etc.)?
    • When you are doing a large context of research, you can
      • search or browse several directories by topic and category;
      • make use of the "OR" Boolean operator in the search tools.
    • When you are doing a research on a well defined topic,
      • you can search by keywords or phrase;
      • search files on a specific Internet site, or Web site;
      • search the contents of a specific file;
      • make use of the "AND" Boolean operator and other advance functions in the search tools.

• Get to know your search tools
  • Infopeople's guide to the INTERNET
  • Searching through directories
    • Berkeley Public Library Index
    • World Wide Web Virtual Library
    • Yahoo
    • Magellan
    • Einet Galaxy
    • LookSmart
    • Einet Galaxy

• Search Engines -- Search engines are sites that send out network robot programs, "crowlers" or "spiders", to search and index the information on publicly accessible Web, Gopher, and FTP servers. When users use the search engines, we are actually searching the complied indexes, which also provide links to the various resources.
  • Some tips for using the search engines
    • All search engines operate differently, they may use different robots, indexing programs, search formats, and criteria for prioritising the search results.
    • It usually takes a few days for the robots to walk through the Internet; therefore, you may find missing links or new information not indexed by the robots.
    • Different search engines will return different search results with the same format of searches.
    • Read the help pages to familiarize with the search engine you use before you start searching.
    • Use several different search engines to compare the results.
  • All in one
  • Alta Vista
  • Dejanews
  • MonkeySweat
  • Excite
  • Hotbot
  • Lycos
  • Magellan
  • Search
  • Yahoo
  • Webcrawler
  • GoCollege
  • SurfWax
  • Meta Search Engines
    • Dogpile
    • Metacrawler
    • W3 Search Engines