The World Wide Web is an excellent resource for obtaining information. For example, teachers can find and share lesson plans, and students can research topics on just about anything they need to know. Finding information on the Web is easy. One way to obtain information is by finding the URL for the page you wish to visit. If you know the URL for a page, simply type in the URL in the location box of your browser.

Unfortunately, most of the time we do not know the URL for the web pages that contain the information we need. If this is the case, you will need to do some type of search to help locate the needed information. Searching on the Web can be fun and easy.
Using Search Engines to Find Information
The Web offers several different search sites. Yahoo, MetaCrawler, Excite and Dogpile are just a few of the commonly used sites. While all of these sites can be used to find information, and most of them look very similar to one another, they are actually very different from each other. The skill development activities in this section will introduce you to the differences between search sites and demonstrate how to use them.
Indexes

Indexes such as Yahoo search through indexed pages also called directories. The collection of pages is essentially a database of authoritative sources that have been put together. Pages have to be submitted and accepted before they can become part of the directory. When you perform a search using Yahoo, it searches through these directories.

Let's do a search for mitosis using Yahoo.

Step 1

Go to Yahoo's website: http://www.yahoo.com

Step 2

Type the search term in the search box and click "Search."
The resulting matches will be displayed. The result shows where in the directory the information you requested is located. Yahoo also displays matches that are related to your search.
Search Engines

Search Engines are different from Indexes in the way they carry out a search. Search engines use a program called a spider. The spider actually goes out and searches the Web and adds what it finds to its database. Google, Alta Vista, and Hotbot are commonly used search engines.

Let's do a search for cloning using Google.

Step 1

Go to the Google website: http://www.google.com/

Step 2

Type in the search term.

Step 3

The resulting websites that match your search term will be displayed. Simply click on the ones you want to view. Note that more than one page of matches may be returned. For our search on cloning, these were the first three websites listed that matched.

The following links are for additional search engines:

Alta Vista - http://www.altavista.com/

Hotbot - http://hotbot.lycos.com/
Meta Searchers
Meta searchers utilize a variety of resources when performing a search. For example, to search for photosynthesis, a meta searcher will return results from multiple search engines and indexes. MetaCrawler and Dogpile are two popular meta searchers. MetaCrawler searched the following search engines to locate information on photosynthesis.
MetaCrawler returned 31 matches. Notice that there are two pages of matches. You can also view the results by site or source.
Dogpile returned the following results for a search on "Quasars." Notice that the results are grouped by search engine.

MetaCrawler website: http://www.metacrawler.com/

Dogpile website: http://www.dogpile.com/
Specialized Indexes

Specialized Indexes are designed for a particular purpose. For example, there are indexes designed to be used primarily by kids. There are also indexes that only contain information about specific topics. News Index is an example. It provides a source list that it searches for current news stories.

To perform a news search go to the News Index website: http://www.newsindex.com/

Yahooligans and Education World are great resources for kids to use to perform searches.

 

Yahooligans :

http://www.yahooligans.com/

 

Education World:

http://www.educationworld.com/

Another way to search is known as "Human Searching." This is often in the form of "Ask an Expert." One example can be found at: http://www.askanexpert.com/
This is Pitsco's Innovative Education kid friendly site where you and your students can connect with hundreds of experts in any number of subject areas.

Lastly, a "Scholarly Search" can be a fast, simple way to find information that has been published in refereed journals. One example can be found at http://askeric.org/Eric/
This site is known as ERIC, Education Resources Information Center, which has more than 1 million abstracts of documents and journal articles related to educational research.

The Web is a great place to find information. These skill development activities have introduced some of the different ways to find information. One thing to keep in mind when locating information on the Web is the source or credibility of the information. Go to the section on Evaluating and Citing Web Resources for more information.
©2000-2002 Julie H. Petlick for Science Junction, NC State University.
All rights reserved.
URL: http://www.ncsu.edu/sciencejunction/route/usetech/useweb/searchengine.html
Last updated 02/08/02

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