Know the difference between a search engine and a directoryĪ search engine like Google or Hotbot lets you seek out specific words and phrases in Web pages. See the Web and internet tutorials in the Links section for online articles about search engines. See the links to Search Engines and to sources which have done Evaluations of the various features of Web directories and search engines.
The burden is on the searcher to learn how to use the features of each search engine. They each index differently and treat users’ queries differently (how nice!). No human being examines the information returned by the spider to see what subject it might be about or whether the words on the Web page adequately reflect the actual main point of the page.Īnother important fact is that all the search engines are different. One important thing to remember about search engines is this: once the engine and the spider have been programmed, the process is totally automated. They may rank the hits as to how close the match is to the words submitted by the user. Engines may be programmed to look for an exact match or a close match (for example, the plural of the word submitted by the user). When a user submits a query, the search engine looks for Web pages containing the words, combinations, or phrases asked for by the user. Most search engines index all the text found on a Web page, except for words too common to index, such as “a, and, in, to, the” and so on. The spider follows hyperlinks from page to page around the Web, gathering and bringing information back to the search engine to be indexed.
The search engines send out a software program known as a spider, crawler or robot. The automated search index is a database containing some or all of the words appearing on the Web pages that have been indexed. Search engines are software tools that allow a user to ask for a list of Web pages containing certain words or phrases from an automated search index. See the section on Reference Sources on the Web for a list of some Web-based reference materials, but please read Information found-and not found-on the Web to understand why it’s different from using the library. The difficulty is finding Web sites that contain the same kind of substantive content you’d find in a library. In addition, many public and academic libraries, like the Internet Public Library, have put together lists of links to Web sites, categorized by subject. The subject-classified Web directories described below will provide you with your main source of links to reference materials on the Web. Get to know the reference sources on the internetįinding reference material on the Web can be a lot more difficult than walking into the Reference Room in your local library. The rest of this section will give you some pointers to help you become an effective internet researcher. Too much information is almost worse than too little, because it takes so much time to sort through it to see if there’s anything useful. This can be an enormous problem when you’re trying to do serious research on the internet. When your search term in one of the popular search engines brings back 130,000 hits, you still wonder if the one thing you’re looking for will be among them. The problem now is not that of “finding anything” but finding a particular thing. The new joke is: The internet is like a library with a thousand catalogs, none of which contains all the books and all of which classify the books in different categories-and the books still move around every night. Finding anything on the internet required comic strip characters like Archie, Veronica and Jughead, and generally you were the one who ended up feeling like a jughead when you rooted around for hours and still came up dry. This is now an old joke: The internet is like a library with no catalog where all the books get up and move themselves every night…This was the state of the internet up until 1995 or thereabouts. Search Strategy: Finding Specific Information Search Strategy: Getting a Broad Overview of a Subject Information Found-and Not Found-on the Web Learn some essential browser skills – bookmarks, favorites and “save as”.