GETTING THE MOST OUT OF THE WEB
Search Engine Tips and Tricks
An Introduction

Finding useful information on the Internet can be a frustrating experience. Too often a simple search in any of the available search engines can lead to far too many "hits" and an abundance of garbage. Although many of the search services that provide access to content on the Internet proclaim that they have the most comprehensive indexes and can deliver the goods within the top ten listings, any Internet user can tell you that it may take hours to really ferret out useful and relevant information. You might get lucky and get what you need the first time out....more likely you will find that many of your searches deliver links to materials that seemingly have no relevance to what you originally had in mind.

Even if you do find what looks like a number of wonderful articles on your topic in the first page of search listings, you might find that a number of the links uncovered don't provide you with information but with error messages. How often have you encountered the notorious 404 error or Internet Explorer's infamous "The page cannot be found" message? Is there anything that you can do to find the missing information? Is there another search strategy that might work?

And, even if you do hit on good links in the first few pages of your search listings, what is there to guarantee that the information you are retrieving is reliable and that the information provider really knows what he or she is talking about? Almost anyone can place almost anything about nearly any topic on the Internet and get away with it. You will find information that is very precise and reliable, but you will also find information that is wildly speculative or, at best, completely biased. And then there are the "creative" pages that look and seem real but are completely fictitious.

This sounds like a very inhospitable place, this Internet. Is it? No, not really. We just need to keep in mind that the Internet is a fluid medium with many authors with many agendas and that we need to be very careful to evaluate materials that we pull from the Web.

So, how do you bring some semblance of control to the search process and gain some kind of control over the resources that you retrieve? By learning more about the Internet and what it is and what it can provide.

We need to learn how to use the resources that are available for searching Web content and to know which search services are more likely to yield useful results. There are plenty of search engines, Web directories, and meta search services that will get you to what you need. Deciding which is the best for a particular purpose is probably the most difficult thing about the whole process. This Web site should help.

Site content and design by Jim Alderman.
Content updated 5 March 2001.