| Do You want to ...? | ...THEN | TRY THESE | TOOLS |
| Browse a broad topic? |
Yahoo www.yahoo.com |
Lycos www.lycos.com |
Starting Point
www.stpt.com |
| Search a narrow topic? | Alta
Vista www.altavista.com |
Excite www.excite.com |
Infoseek - GO www.infoseek.go.com |
| Search large amounts of the Internet?(mega-search) | Metacrawler www.go2net.com |
Dogpile www.dogpile.com |
Profusion
www.profusion.com |
| Search reviewed sites? | Magellan
magellan.excite.com |
Argus Clearinghouse www.clearinghouse.net |
About.com
www.miningco.com |
| BrowseEducational Topics and Resources? | Schrock's Guide www.discoveryschool. com/schrookguide/ |
Blue Web'n www.kn.pacbell.com/ wired/bluewebn/ |
The Gateway
www.thegateway.org |
| Search specific types of databases? | Switchboard www.Switchboard.com |
MapQuest www.mapquest.com |
Research-It!
www.itools.com/research-it |
| Search for educational materials and reviews? | K-12 Weblinks www.itrc.ucf.edu/k12db |
EvaluTech www.evalutech.sreb.org |
FREE www.ed.gov/free |
If you are not satisfied with your results, try another search engine; check your spelling; or try the following advanced techniques.
| Search Strategy | Explanation | Examples |
| Boolean operators | AND limits your search,
requiring that both or all word appear
OR is used to capture synonyms or related words NOT eliminates possibilities that you suspect will cause problems (Some search engines use + and — for AND and NOT |
Vietnam AND protest AND
students
French AND cooking car OR automobile coronary OR heart Martin Luther NOT King China NOT dishes |
| Wildcards | An asterisk (*) or a questionmark (?) may be used to stand for any character or string of characters. | teen* (picks up teenage,
teenagers, or teens)
Herz? (for Herzegovina) wom?n (for woman or women) |
| Natural language searches | Some search engines allow you to type in questions as you would think or speak them. | Why is the sky blue? |
| Phrases | You often will want words to appear together in specific order. Commonly, quotation marks ("") set words off as phrases to be searched as a whole. (Some search engines use parentheses, commas, or hyphens instead of quotation marks.) | "vitamin A"
"bed and breakfast" "George Washington Carver" |
| Proximity | Words often are not meaningful in your search unless they appear near each other in a document. In large documents, words separated by lots of text are generally unrelated. ADJ specifies that two words appear next to each other. NEAR/25 specifies that two words appear within 25 words of each other. | global ADJ warming
Eric Clapton NEAR/10 Cream |
| Field searching | This feature restricts searches to certain portions of Web documents. It allows you to specify that the search words appear in the title, URL, or first paragraph. | title: cancer
URL: epa |
| Case sensitivity | Most search engines are case insensitive by default. However, there are some that recognize uppercase and lowercase variations. | Baker (retrieves name and
eliminates reference to cake and bread makers)
AIDS (eliminates reference to helpers) China (eliminates references to dishes) |