Location and Access of Information

Try one of the search tools below to try a search.

Simple search	Type in baseball. Look at your list of results.
	Are there personal 'fan pages'? How about pages from teams? Is the Major League Baseball page near the top? How might you get better results?
	Type in orioles. Look at your list of results.
	Are the pages referring to the bird or the baseball team?

Complex Search	Type in orioles AND baseball
	Is the Baltimore Orioles baseball page the first hit? What could you do to narrow your search further? Try getting rid of the AND and putting plus signs in front of each key word. Did your results change?
	Type tom cruise OR helen hunt.
	Did your list of hits include pages from their movies? How about fan pages? How many pages of results did you get? Do some of the results look questionable?

Phrase Search	Type in "internet movie database"
	Was the first hit the Internet Movie Database? How far down was the link to Internet Movie Database? Why were some others listed? What other sites are listed? Can you tell why you got each hit? (all three words as a phrase must be present)

Natural Language Search	Type in What are the television stations in Baltimore?.
	Do you get a list of Baltimore tv stations? Are there other types of stations (i.e. radio) listed? Try adding quotes. What happens?

Directories	Yahoo  LookSmart  Magellan
Search Engines	AltaVista  Excite  HotBot  InfoSeek  Lycos  Northern Light  Web Crawler
MetaSearch Tools	MetaCrawler  Mamma  Search.Com

Now try a search of interest to you. Try it as a simple search and then narrow your search by using some of the techniques listed above. Try one of each type of tool listed in the chart above. Also try more than one search engine. Compare your results. Which type of search tool gave the best results? Which search engine gave you the best results?

What Are Search Tools?

Searching Strategies

Location and Access of Information

Evaluating Skills

Search Lesson Home