The Basileiad Library at Manor College. Information Literacy course. Web Research Strategies.

Because there is so much misleading material on the internet, it is important to search with care. Using directories is more reliable than using search engines, but if you must use search engines then the most important strategy in internet searching is to learn to use at least two search engines really well. This means going to the 'advanced search' options and using the suggestions there. Every search engine is different and by using more than one you will cover missed items. Be aware, however, that some sites won’t differ much from one another. For example, ‘Yahoo’ uses ‘Google’ to do its searching, so there is not a lot of difference between the two search engines. Find two search engines that give different results.

The basis of all online searching is Boolean Logic. This involves the use of the operands 'and', 'or' & 'not' to expand or restrict the search. For example, typing "dental or hygiene" will give you all of the sites that include the word "dental" as well as all the web pages that include the word "hygiene". To make sure that the results contain both words, the search should be "dental and hygiene". Search engines generally assume that you mean to use the word "and" between all of your keywords. To narrow a search, you introduce the word "not". For example: (dental and hygiene) not toothpaste to get any item on dental hygiene that is not about toothpaste.

When doing research on the World Wide Web, remember that America has its own way of spelling many words, and that your search may miss out on English/European/Australia/South Africa etc. sites because your keywords are spelled differently. The most common differences include 'our' instead of 'or' at the end of such words as color (colour), Neighbor (neighbour), labor (labour) etc. Another common difference is the use of 're' instead of 'er' at the end of such words as theater (theatre), center (centre), etc. Also, 's' is used instead of 'z' in such words as organization (organisation), subsidize (subsidise), organize (organise) etc. Although this difference in spelling might not affect you while at Manor, more extensive research will be expected at a four year college or university.

Some useful hints for searching web sites can be found at 'Hints for searching the web' under the Find Internet Sites heading on the library's web page. Google has some particularly useful options, such as the use of the tilde (~) to find words with a similar meaning to your keyword. The Librarians' Index to the Internet (www.lii.org) allows the use of an asterisk (*) to extend the range of a word. For example: contract* will find contract, contracts, contracting, contractual, etc..

Other countries have an indicator on the end of their URL to indicate which country that web site is in. (for example, http://www.atlantida.gr/  is from Greece) You can restrict your searches to those countries by keying in 'site:.ua' (for Ukraine) after your search terms. A listing of country code suffixes can be found at http://www.isbc.com/business/cty-code.cfm. 

If you can't find what you are looking for, there could be a number of reasons:
        a Publisher's can't include the work of freelance writers in online databases without their permission,
                so they often exclude those articles.
        a Web site administrators can use code to prevent search engines from indexing their web site.
        a Some web page formats will be ignored by search engines.
        a Some books and articles are not available because of copyright reasons.
The extent of the 'invisible web', the portion of the world wide web that is unsearchable, is huge. Ways to search the invisible web include using directories, and adding the word 'database' to your search.

Much of the information contained in this section comes from experts in the field who not only keep up with what's new, but also issue emailed newsletters outlining changes and giving handy tips. These sites include:

Mary Ellen Bates. www.batesinfo.com
Consumer Web Watch  www.consumerwebwatch.org
Internet Resources Newsletter www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/irn/irn.html
Librarian's Index to the Internet http://lii.org/ntw
Gary Price's Resource Shelf www.resourceshelf.com
Search Engine Watch. http://searchenginewatch.com.

The next page will advise you on how to evaluate your information resources.

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