Are you confused by all the places to visit on the Internet? Are you lost in the vast piles of junk that now appear on search engines (i.e. forget about www.yoursite.com, gamble with us instead)? Up the creek without a paddle? Well let me suggest some solutions, simple but effective. As the search engine becomes more of a commercial venture it becomes less useful; try these strategies.
Subject trees:
(www.yahho.com,www.clearinghouse.net) attempt to categorize web documents by subject. They contain active links to the documents they index. When you have reached the appropriate subject tree click on the heading that best describes your area of interest. This will lead to further links; click on one that is most relevant.
Subject trees to get you started are; www.bubl.ac.uk which list academic source documents on a wide variety of subjects.
How do you find the right material in search engines?
1) Use double quotations around your search phrase:
simply pick a phrase (dog shows Canada) and surround it with "dog shows Canada". This will ignore the single words "dog", "shows", "Canada" and only search for the entire phrase "dog show Canada" thus eliminating thousands of unnecessary web documents.
2) Use Boolean Operators:
Boolean operators are words used to search for a specific topic. The operators AND, OR, and NOT are used to indicate the relationship among single words.
When you use Boolean words together you (i.e. auto AND engine AND diesel) will find all documents that contain the words: "auto", "engine", "diesel".
The Boolean OR tells the search engine to show you any documents that contain any of the key words you have typed (i.e. widgets or carriages).
3) Using the word NOT:
When you retrieve a number of documents, you notice that some of the material is not related to what you have searched for. The NOT operator provides a way to exclude these documents (i.e. Rock NOT music NOT Roll) would tell the search engine you only want material on Rocks but not music and not rock and roll.
4) use of web site URL
If you know the address (URL)(ie www.websitename.com) you quickly fine the relevant web site by placement of its URL in the search engine query field.
A particularly good book is Web Search Strategies by Bryan Pfaffenberger published by MIS Press , 1996. There are a number of specialized sites which can be used by persons with specific purposes or topics in mind. One of the better ones is ; Internet Public Library Reference Center (http://www.ipl.org/ref/). The page has a graphic interface that resembles the layout out of your public library and is easy to navigate to the different subject areas.
If you want help with your standard reference works try the Webster's dictionary (http://www.m-w.com); or the on line computer term references (http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk