How to do research on the internet

Search engines

How do they work?

A computer program (a "bot" or "spider") is constantly searching the Web. Information found is sent to a central database. When you enter a search term, you are retrieving information from this central database.

Use a search engine when you are looking for less common words, narrow topics, and to return a large number of pages.

Examples:
Google http://www.google.com/
AltaVista http://www.altavista.com/

Advantages of a search engine:

• very wide coverage of the Web, therefore you should find more material
• many try to sort material by how relevant it is to your query
• offer the opportunity to refine and enhance your search
• many offer links to useful related material
• many offer a directory listing of popular sites

Disadvantages of a search engine:

• can often return too much material
• minimal sorting of material returned, particularly of similar material at the same address
• different engines cover different pages, so you need to search in more than one
• all engines have slightly different rules for refining a search
• some engines have been found to include paid listings in search results that are not clearly labelled as advertisements