1. Surf and Seach
Online Resources

2. Question
Do you ever go into the Internet and plan to only spend a small amount of time looking for something and spend much longer than you intended trying to find one thing?

3. -Problem-
Millions of people waste precious time and energy looking for information on the Internet without the proper searching tools to help be more effective Internet searchers

4. Tips for successful Searching
There are many tools to search for online information
Search Engines
Indexes or directories
Metasearch sites
Link Lists
Shared bookmarks

5. What are you Searching?
When you search for data on the internet, you are searching a database of information, not the web.

6. Indexes
These are web sites that are organized by categories. Some examples of online indexes include:
Libdex, which is a worldwide index of library catalogs, libraries and books
Project Gutenberg online books, which contains a listing of over 35,000 free books on the Web
The National Geographic index
Technical indexes
And many more

7. Metasearch sites
A metasearch engine is a search tool that sends user request to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list or displays them according to their source.
Metasearch engines enable users to search criteria once and access several search engines simultaneously.
Examples of metasearch engines:
Webcrawler.com
Search.com
Infospace.com

8. Link Lists and Shared Bookmarking
Link lists are collections of links organized by topics or categories. There are a variety of topics on the Web that are organized into link list sites. Similarly there are shared bookmark sites which are usually created as favorite sites that people share with their friends and associates.

9. Search Engines
No single tool indexes or organizes the entire Web. When you search for data on the internet, you are searching a database of information-not the Web.
You will get different results from different Engines because they have different databases.
Commonly used search engines:
Google
Bing
Dogpile
Ask
How Search Works (watch this video by Google) if the link doesn’t work try clicking on the movie

10. How to get more out of your search
When using a search engine you can refine your search by using:
Keywords
Phrase searching
Search Engine Math
Boolean Searching
Wildcard Searching

11. Key word searches People most often use key word searches
A key word search is where you simply type the words you are searching for into the search bar in your engine
Key word searches return many unrelated results because any page that contains any of the key words satisfies the searching criteria
If you don’t find relevant results in the first page of results try refining your search using another method

12. Phrase searching
Phrase searching refers to grouping words together using quotation marks.
Searches for words inside quotation marks will only return pages when those words appear next to each other.
For instance “George Washington” will only give results where “George” and “Washington” appear next to each other instead of any page with “George” or any page with “Washington”.
If you are searching for more than one phrase, separate the phrases with a comma: “George Washington”, “Valley Forge”

13. Search Engine Math
Math symbols can be used to make keywords more specific thereby refining your search results.
Insert a (+) symbol before words that should appear on the page
Insert a (–) symbol before words that should not appear on the page
Suppose you are making a cake and you want a recipe for peanut butter but not chocolate—search for ”peanut butter”+recipe-chocolate+cake
This tells the search engine to find a cake recipe that does not contain chocolate but has peanut butter

14. Wildcard Searching
The symbol * or asterisk can be used as a wildcard character in an Web search. If you do not know the spelling of a word you can use the wildcard character in place of the letters you are unsure of.
Let’s say you wanted information on Albuquerque, New Mexico and you didn’t know how to spell it—search for Albu* NM
Not all search engines support wildcard characters.

15. Continue onto the next page in your assignment