Types of Search Questions Specific question-  a question that you can phrase easily and recognize the answer to.  Specific questions require you to narrow the search until you find the answer to your question.   Exploratory question- an open-ended question that can be harder to phrase.  Exploratory questions start with general questions and lead you to more information about the topic.

Five-step web search process: Determine if the question is specific or exploratory. Formulate and state the question Select the appropriate web search tool Evaluate the search results Repeat the previous steps until you find the answer

Search engine A special web page that finds other web pages that match a word or phrase you enter. Results pages-  Web pages that contain hyperlinks to the pages that contain text that matches your search expression. A web robot (or spider) is a program that searches the web for new websites and updates information on old sites for a database.

Search engine The only price you have to pay to use these tools is to see advertising banners. Meta tag-  HTML code that is place on a web page to inform web robots about the content of the page Full text indexing-  storing the entire content of every web page visited in a database.

Web Directory Listing of hyperlinks to web pages organized into categories.  the difference between a search engine and a directory is that people select the web pages to include in a web directory (instead of a robot program).  Yahoo uses real people to do most of the selection and classification of pages.

Web Directory Hybrid search engine directory-  A combination of search engine and directory used for searching the web. Meta-search engine-  combines the power of multiple search engines.  Each search engine has different strengths

Other Sites Many sites contain hyperlinks to other useful sites. You can store information from pages by: printing copies of the pages sending the URLs by e-mail saving the web pages and attaching them to an e-mail.

Boolean Logic and Filtering Techniques The most important factor in getting good results from a search engine is to select the search terms you use carefully. Boolean operators specify logical relationships between the elements they join.  AND, OR, and NOT are recognized by most search engines.  Just include them with your search terms.

Boolean Logic and Filtering Techniques Precedence operator-  clarifies the grouping within a complex expression usually indicated with a parentheses. Location operator-  lets you search for terms that appear close to each other in the text of a page.  The most common location operator is the NEAR operator which finds only pages in which the terms are close to each other. Wild character-  allows you to omit part of the search term or terms

To conduct a complex search using AltaVista: Open the AltaVista search engine Select the Advanced Search option Choose a language filter Devise and enter a suitable search expression Click the Search button Elevate the results and revise your search expression as necessary

To conduct a complex search using HotBot: Open the HotBot search engine Open the HotBot Advanced Search page Set the Loc for field to allow Boolean operators Choose a date and geographic region filters Devise and enter a suitable search expression Click the SEARCH button Evaluate the results and revise your search expression as necessary

To conduct a complex search using Excite: Open the Excite search engine Devise and enter a suitable search expression Click the Search button Evaluate the results and revise your search expression as necessary

To conduct a complex search using Northern Light: Open the Northern Light search engine Devise and enter a suitable search expression Click the Search button Evaluate the results and revise your search expression as necessary