ONLINE RESOURCES

QUESTION Do you ever go into the Internet and plan to only spend a small amount of time looking for something and spend much longer than you intended trying to find one thing?

-PROBLEM- Millions of people waste precious time and energy looking for information on the Internet without the proper searching tools to help be more effective Internet searchers

TIPS FOR SUCCESSFUL SEARCHING There are many tools to search for online information Search Engines Indexes or directories Metasearch sites Link Lists Shared bookmarks

WHAT ARE YOU SEARCHING? When you search for data on the internet, you are searching a database of information, not the web.

INDEXES These are web sites that are organized by categories. Some examples of online indexes include: Libdex, which is a worldwide index of library catalogs, libraries and books Project Gutenberg online books, which contains a listing of over 35,000 free books on the Web The National Geographic index Technical indexes And many more

METASEARCH SITES A metasearch engine is a search tool that sends user request to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list or displays them according to their source. Metasearch engines enable users to search criteria once and access several search engines simultaneously. Examples of metasearch engines: Webcrawler.com Search.com Infospace.com

LINK LISTS AND SHARED BOOKMARKING Link lists are collections of links organized by topics or categories. There are a variety of topics on the Web that are organized into link list sites. Similarly there are shared bookmark sites which are usually created as favorite sites that people share with their friends and associates.

SEARCH ENGINES No single tool indexes or organizes the entire Web. When you search for data on the internet, you are searching a database of information-not the Web. You will get different results from different Engines because they have different databases. Commonly used search engines: Google Bing Dogpile Ask How Search Works (watch this video by Google) if the link doesn’t work try clicking on the movie  How Search Works

HOW TO GET MORE OUT OF YOUR SEARCH When using a search engine you can refine your search by using: Keywords Phrase searching Search Engine Math Boolean Searching Wildcard Searching

KEY WORD SEARCHES People most often use key word searches A key word search is where you simply type the words you are searching for into the search bar in your engine Key word searches return many unrelated results because any page that contains any of the key words satisfies the searching criteria If you don’t find relevant results in the first page of results try refining your search using another method

PHRASE SEARCHING Phrase searching refers to grouping words together using quotation marks. Searches for words inside quotation marks will only return pages when those words appear next to each other. For instance “George Washington” will only give results where “George” and “Washington” appear next to each other instead of any page with “George” or any page with “Washington”. If you are searching for more than one phrase, separate the phrases with a comma: “George Washington”, “Valley Forge”

SEARCH ENGINE MATH Math symbols can be used to make keywords more specific thereby refining your search results. Insert a (+) symbol before words that should appear on the page Insert a (–) symbol before words that should not appear on the page Suppose you are making a cake and you want a recipe for peanut butter but not chocolate—search for + ”peanut butter”+recipe-chocolate+cake This tells the search engine to find a cake recipe that does not contain chocolate but has peanut butter

BOOLEAN SEARCHING Boolean logic is another way to search which is similar to search engine math but has a little more power. Boolean logic is based on a simple Yes or No ranking system. Boolean logic consists of three logical operators: AND NOT OR Sometimes it’s easier to narrow a search by specifying what you are NOT looking for.

AND OPERATOR The AND operator instructs the Search Engine to search for All documents containing All words you specify

So back to our cake recipe example, search for “cake AND recipe”-The more things your combine with AND the fewer results you will get. So if you want peanut butter cake recipes without chocolate, search for: cake AND recipe AND “peanut butter” NOT chocolate Using OR logic will return more results

WILDCARD SEARCHING The symbol * or asterisk can be used as a wildcard character in an Web search. If you do not know the spelling of a word you can use the wildcard character in place of the letters you are unsure of. Let’s say you wanted information on Albuquerque, New Mexico and you didn’t know how to spell it—search for Albu* NM Not all search engines support wildcard characters.

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