Web Research Guide  Tags: web_research internet_research web_literate web_searching  

Make a list of as many keywords as you can think of to describe your topic. Try these in a variety of searches.

As you view your results, look for a variety of words that other authors are using to describe your topic and do searches for those.

To find the most popular web sites and web pages on your topic, try Ask.com as well as Google. Google lists the most popular pages first. Ask.com gives you more results options. Yahoo! is another great search engine with lots of options including a directory.

Notice the tiny binoculars at each listed result. Hover over that with your mouse to get a preview of the web page it links to. Notice the variety of file and format types the results are divided into. Ask may also suggest related searches.
 

	Ranks by site relevancy Help searching Yahoo!
Yahoo! Advanced Search

	Ranks by site popularity Help searching Google
Google Advanced Search

About Google: At the top of the page, right above the box where you keyed in your search terms, there are several words. Make sure your words are still in the search box. Take your time and one by one, select the words and view the results for Images, Maps, News, etc. Images will search for those; News does a search in many news sources. Now select the arrow next to “more” to see additional search options. All of these choices are available for any topic that you place in the search box at Google.

You may notice that when you do a web search, there are links to News and Image results showing up mixed with your standard list of results. This is known as federated searching. The search engine is searching the invisible web in several databases and returning the compiled results to you in one list.

To perform effective web research, you have to do more than use simple web search engines.

There is no single place that you can do a comprehensive web search.

Be prepared to visit a variety of sites to search for information about your topic.

Use the dropdown tabs under "search strategy" to search:

multimedia

searching audiovisual resources can be a valuable method of research for many topics

blogs

blogs = web logs, Internet diaries or personal commentaries can lead to valuable documents on hot topics

government information

many government publications are available on the web, and you need to know how to search for these

invisible web

a good way to think of the deep or invisible web is to consider it as free access to databases available on the web

metasearch engines

help save time by compiling results from several search engines

scholary directories

where Librarians or other information professionals have selected the best web sites and arranged them