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How to Find What You Need on the Internet
By CJ Kazilek
Illustrated by CJ Kazilek
show/hide words to know
- Biased: when someone presents only one viewpoint. Biased articles do not give all the facts and often mislead the reader.
- Boolean logic: a way to combine words called logical operators to improve search results. The Boolean system uses logical operators AND, OR, and NOT. Named after the English George Boole... more
- Internet: a communications network that connects computers around the world.
- Keyword: a significant word from a title or document that is used to index content.
- Metasearch engines: a website that searches other search engines. This allows a person to use many search engine databases from one website.
- Search engine: a website that provides search tools used to locate content on the Web. Usually search engines collect information on a large number of websites and places them in an index that can be searched quickly to find needed information... more
- URL: stands for "uniform resource locator." The unique address for websites and each of their pages.
- Unique: one of a kind.
- Web: short for World Wide Web (WWW) is a collection of linked electronic documents accessed by the Internet through a web browser... more
Searching for things on the Web can be like hunting for a needle in a large haystack. Just how large is the Internet? When this article was first written in 2001 there were an estimated 4.5 billion Web pages. More than 7.3 million new pages were being added each day. By 2009 the estimated number of Web pages had grown to 25.1 billion! That is six times as much information as you can find in the Library of Congress. The search engine company Google also announced that in 2008 they had discoverd one trillion unique URLs.
With all that information, you might think it would be easy to write a great paper. However, the Web is just like any tool, it takes skill to get the best results. This is particularly true for science topics. If you want to write that great paper, you need to learn to use good searching skills. If you don't know these skills then you might as well start looking for that needle in the haystack.
Internet research skills...
Anyone who has used the Web knows it can be a great place to find information. Searching for the information can also be frustrating and a waste of valuable time. Before we blame the Web or the search engines let's get to the root of the problem. How do you find the information you need in that very large haystack of web pages? The answer is to learn some of the methods that will shorten your search. Here is a summary of tips and suggestions to help make your Web searches more productive. All of the tips will help you locate and evaluate information. Some of them will also make those science topic searches easier.
References:
(2009, September 22). WWW FAQs: How many websites are there? Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/sizeofweb.html
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