| Finding Information on the Internet
A TUTORIAL NEWLY revised, Fall 2000 Teaching Library Internet Workshops University of California, Berkeley |
You can have confidence in your search results (if you evaluate everything you find) and learn ways to refine and focus your searches. When you retrieve more than you want, the best search engines let you exclude irrelevant documents and extract those you want from the rest. You can make some search tools almost "read" search results for you. This is possible in only a few of the many search tools out there. Others offer other strengths. We offer an array of meta-search engines, which are useful as a place to start. But they are always more superficial.
To cope with a WWW of billions of pages, you also need to use good directories to locate hand-picked best sites by subject, and to find the "Invisible Web" -- a wealth of information found only by searching within a database via the web (rarely found in search engines). Therefore this tutorial now provides training three classes of directories: general by subject, specialized on gateway or expert pages, and specialized in searchable databases. All contain hand-picked selections, often carefully evaluated and described. These belong in your search strategy just as much as search engines.
| LINKS to the rest of the UC Berkeley Teaching Library Internet Tutorial: | ||||||||
|