This document provides guidance on effective internet searching strategies. It discusses defining your search topic, identifying appropriate search locations, developing effective search queries, and evaluating the credibility of sources. Key recommendations include planning your search offline first by identifying questions and keywords. When searching, consider specialized databases and directories instead of only major search engines. Techniques for evaluating sources include examining the URL, domain, author credentials, and date of publication. Sources should be cross-referenced from different credible locations.

1. Rsearching
e

2. Internet
Search
Strategies
1. What am I looking for?
2. Where should I look?
3. How can I find what I’m looking for?
4. How do I know if what I find is credible?
5. How do I cite my sources?

3. Step 1:
What Am I Looking For?

4.  Broad or general information?
 Specific data or facts?
 Expert opinions?
 Alternative or Differing Perspectives?
Reduce lab time and frustration…
 Offline Search — Make a Plan

5. Before Online Search…
Do Offline Search
 What are the questions?
 What are the keywords?
 Develop the queries
 Choose the resources

6. Searching is not the same
as Researching

7. Step 2:
Where Should I Look?

8. major search engines
.com
Pro vs. Con

9. Metasearch engines
Pro vs. Con

10. Google’s other databases

11. www.technorati.com
Do a search in google for
“blog search engine”

12. Subject Directories
 Built by information specialists
 Selected, evaluated, annotated
 Organized into subject categories
 Librarians’ Internet Index (lii.org)
 By a group of California library professionals
 Infomine
 By UC consortium of library professionals
 MEL
 Michigan Electronic Library
Pro vs. Con

13. Visual Search Engines
 Kartoo
 Quintara
Pro vs. Con

14. Specialized Search Databases

15. Subscription Databases
InfoTrac Junior Edition
http://infotrac.galegr oup.com/itweb/temp88056
Home access password: temp_log
Other specialized collections:
War & Terrorism, Religion
Pro vs. Con

16. What About Wikipedia?
 Wikipedia
 How does it work?
 The criticism of Wikipedia
 When should it be used?
 How should it be used?
 How shouldn’t it be used?

17. Google’s Page Rank
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))
 BEFORE you search:
“Crawls” pages on the public web
Copies text & images, builds database
 WHEN you search:
Automatically ranks pages in your results
 Word occurrence and location on page
 Popularity - a link to a page is a vote for that page
 Over 200 factors applied to result of a search

18. Step 3:
How Will I Find What I’m
Looking For?

19. Be Specific
 War of 1812 history vs. war of 1812 economic causes
 Word forced to appear on the page +keyword
+transportation +system +future
(NO SPACE between + and the keyword)
 Specify exact phrases “put the phrase in quotes”
“global warming”
“Holocaust survivors”
“World Trade Center”
 Exclude a word -keyword (NO space between – and keyword)
+American +Poetry -sonnet

20. The asterisk is a wildcard *
It will find alternate suffixes.
Organiz* would find:
Organize, organizes, organization,
organizing, etc.
interview* would find:
Interview, interviews, interviewing,
interviewer

21. Possible Queries
Lebanon war
Lebanon civil war
Lebanon “civil war”
“Lebanese civil war” +causes
Then from there use strategies to pull from specific domains or
specific file types, etc.
“Lebanese civil war” +causes site:gov
“Lebanese civil war” +causes site:edu
"lebanese civil war" +causes site:edu filetype:ppt

22. Get Smart
 Understanding Domains
 What are the most reliable domains?
 Country codes
http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm
 Examining the URL
 http://www.emich.edu/graduate/users/history/crimestat.html

23. Red Flags
 Look at the URL
~ , % , users, members, people, public, blog
Wordpress, blogspot, typepad, edublogs
Geocities, angelfire, lycos, yahoo, tripod, AOL

24. Narrow the Search
 Website or domain
site:whitehouse.gov “global warming”
site:edu “global warming”
 File type
filetype:ppt site:edu “global warming”
 Google advanced search page

25. Google Results Page
 Missing Page? Use Cache
 Related pages
On a result page:
 Browser edit menu>find
http://www.ghazi.de/civwar.html

26. Step 4:
How Do I Know if the
Information is Credible?

27. CRITICAL EVALUATION
Why Evaluate What You Find on the Web?
 Anyone can put up a Web page
 about anything
 Many pages not kept up-to-date
 No quality control
 less trustworthy than scholarly publications
 no selection guidelines for search engines

28. Web Evaluation Techniques
Before you click to view the page...
Look at the URL - personal page or site?
~ , % , users, members, people, public, blog
Wordpress, blogspot, typepad, edublogs
Geocities, angelfire, lycos, yahoo, tripod, AOL
 Domain name appropriate for the content?
edu, com, org, net, gov, ca.us, uk, etc.
 Published by an entity that makes sense ?
 News from its source?
www.nytimes.com
 Advice from valid agency?
www.nih.gov

29. Web Evaluation Techniques
Scan the perimeter of the page
 Can you tell who wrote it ?
 name of page author
 organization, institution, agency you recognize
 e-mail contact by itself not enough
 Credentials for the subject matter ?
 Look for links to:
“About us” “Philosophy” “Background” “Biography”
 Is it recent or current enough ?
 Look for “last updated” date - usually at bottom
 If no links or other clues...
 truncate back the URL
 Modern poetry site

30. Web Evaluation Techniques
Indicators of quality
 Sources documented
 links, footnotes, etc.
 As detailed as you expect in print publications ?
 do the links work ?
 Information retyped or forged
 why not a link to published version instead ?
 Links to other resources
 biased, slanted ?

31. Web Evaluation Techniques
Do Some Detective Work
 Search the URL in alexa.com
 Who links to the site? Who owns the domain?
 Type or paste the URL into the basic search box
 Traffic for top 100,000 sites
 See what links are in Google’s Similar pages
 Look up the page author in Google
 http://whois.domaintools.com liberty05.com
 What did the site look like in the past?
www.archive.org

32. Web Evaluation Techniques
STEP BACK & ASK: Does it all add up
?
 Why was the page put on the Web ?
 inform with facts and data?
 explain, persuade?
 sell, entice?
 share, disclose?
 as a parody or satire?
 Is it appropriate for your purpose?

33. Cross Referencing
 Triangulation—(3 angles)
 3 DIFFERENT sources that agree on the same
fact or data
 Why?

34. Step 5:
How Do I Site My Sources?

35. Cite it
 Son of Citation Machine
 Knightsite
 Open a word processor
 Copy and paste citation generated from
Citation Machine
 .5” indent of second line of each citation for
MLA (and every line after within that source)
Warlick, David. "Stop The Madness." Landmark Project. June 15,
2007. Technology in Learning. 25 Sep 2007
<http://elearning.org/article/2007/expertart07.html>.