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Using the Internet
The
Internet can be a valuable source for your academic research; however, you need
to be "information literate" about the roadblocks on the information highway.
Finding the Web documents you want can be easy or seem impossibly difficult.
This is in part due to the sheer size of the WWW, currently estimated to contain
billions of documents. It is also because the WWW is not indexed in any standard
vocabulary. Unlike a library's catalogs, in which can use standardized Library
of Congress subject headings to find books in most large, general libraries in
the U.S., in Web searching you are always guessing what words will be in the
pages you want to find or guessing what subject terms were chosen by someone to
organize a web page or site covering some topic.
When
you do what is called "searching the Web," you are NOT searching it directly. It
is not possible to search the WWW directly. The Web is the totality of the many
web pages which reside on computers all over the world. Your computer cannot
find or go to them all directly. What you are able to do through your computer
is access one or more of many intermediate search tools available now. You
search a search tool's database or collection of sites -- a relatively small
subset of the entire World Wide Web. The search tool provides you with links to
other pages. You click on these links, and retrieve documents, images, sound,
and more from individual servers around the world.
There
is no way for anyone to search the entire Web, and any search tool that claims
that it offers it all to you is distorting the truth.
Excellent Overview of
Search Engines (from Univ of North Florida)
Search Engines
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Types of Search Tools |
Characteristics |
Examples |
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Search Engines (& Meta-Search Engines) |
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Full-text of
selected Web pages
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Search by
keyword, trying to match exactly the words in the pages
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No browsing, no
subject categories
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Databases
compiled by "spiders" (computer-robot programs) with minimal human
oversight
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Search-Engine
size: from small and specialized to 90+ percent of the indexable Web
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Meta-Search
Engines quickly and superficially search several individual search engines
at once and return results compiled into a sometimes convenient format.
Caveat: They only catch about 10% of search results in any of the search
engines they visit.
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Search Engines recommended and described in this
tutorial: Google,
Alta Vista Advanced Search, Northern Light Power Search, Alltheweb
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Meta-Search
Engines:
vivisimo
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Subject Directories |
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Human-selected
sites picked by editors (sometimes experts in a subject)
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Often carefully
evaluated and kept up to date, but not always -- frequently not if large
and general
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Usually organized
into hierarchical subject categories
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Often annotated
with descriptions (not in Yahoo!)
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Can browse
subject categories or search using broad, general terms
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NO full-text
of documents. Searches need to be less specific than in search
engines, because you are not matching on the words in the pages you
eventually want. In Directories you are searching only the subject
categories and descriptions you see in its pages.
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Recommended and
described in this tutorial: Librarians' Index, Infomine, Yahoo!, About.com,
AcademicInfo
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There are
thousands of Subject Directories on practically every topic you can think
of.
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Specialized Databases |
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The Web provides
access through a search box into the contents of a database in a computer
somewhere
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Can be on any
topic, can be trivial, commercial, task-specific, or a rich treasure
devoted to your topic
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Locate
specialized databases by looking for them in good Subject Directories like
the Librarian's Index, Yahoo!, or AcademicInfo; in special guides to
searchable databases; and sometimes by keyword searching in general search
engines
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