Tools of the Trade
- Subject Directories
- How they work - sites are collected and organized into subject areas (broad to narrow)
Advantages - good for finding broad or popular topics, organizations,
events, places; fairly easy to navigate; offer links to top page of web
sites indexed
Disadvantages - index small number of sites; not good for specific,
narrow or complex topics
Examples -
- Yahoo
(www.yahoo.com)
LookSmart (www.looksmart.com)
Snap (www.snap.com)
- Review or Ranking Sources
- How they work - these sources either seek out or accept
submissions, then evaluate them for quality
Advantages - good for broad, popular topics; good for finding quality
sites
Disadvantages - small number of sites indexed
Examples -
- Argus
Clearinghouse (www.clearinghouse.net)
eBlast (eblast.com)
Librarian's Index to the Internet (lii.org)
- Search Engines
- How they work - electronic "spiders" periodically roam the
Internet searching the content of sites; information about these sites
is collected and kept in a database; you search the contents of the
search engine's database
not the entire Internet.
Advantages - large number of sites indexed; more comprehensive than directories; good
for
specific, narrow, complex or obscure topics or phrases; offer variety of
features to help you modify your search
Disadvantages - size of search results often overwhelming; relevance
determined by computer; high percentage of noise (sites unrelated to
search)
Examples -
- Alta Vista
(www.altavista.digital.com)
HotBot (www.hotbot.com)
Lycos (www.lycos.com)
Excite (www.excite.com)
InfoSeek (www.infoseek.com)
- Meta Search Engines
- How they work - they submit your query to multiple search engines
simultaneously
Advantages - good for obscure, straight-forward searches; offers
way to compare search engines
Disadvantages - not good for complex searches; slow
Examples -
- MetaCrawler
(www.metacrawler.com)
Dog Pile (www.dogpile.com)
- Next Generation
- Google (www.google.com) – Using its patented PageRank TM, Google ranks the importance of search results by examining the links that lead to a specific site. The more links that lead to a site, the higher the site is ranked.
- Ask Jeeves (www.aj.com) – This search engine supports natural language inquires, meaning, you can phrase your search in the form of a question (i.e. "Which country has the highest number of bald men under 30?")
Outline
Tricks of the Trade 
Evaluating What You Find