World Wide Web Search Engines

Concepts, Mechanics, and Evaluation of Retrieval

These sites address the differences among the various search engines and provide the user with tips on how to take full advantage of each engine's strengths.

Searching the Internet
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/toolkit/searching/index.html

How Search Engines Work

From Search Engine Watch, a site that contains much useful information on web searching. Danny Sullivan, editor.
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/work.html

Internet Search Tool Details

A search tips guide to many of the major engines on the web.
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Help/searchdetails.html

Evaluation of Selected Internet Search Tools

From Northwestern University.
http://www.library.nwu.edu/resources/internet/search/

Major WWW Search Engine Types

Spiders, or Robots (Search the Web)

Search engines "crawl" the web, creating their listings automatically. Then users (you) search through what they have found.

AltaVista
http://altavista.digital.com/
Google
http://www.google.com/

Indexes, or Directories

A directory such as Yahoo! depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.

Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com/
The Librarians' Index to the Internet
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/InternetIndex/

Meta-Search Engines

Meta-search engines use multiple search engines simultaneously to retrieve the maximum number of hits. These are good starting points for searching hard-to-find materials -- the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack.

Metacrawler
http://www.metacrawler.com/
Dogpile
http://www.dogpile.com

The Web as a Research Tool

While "Websurfing" has been a popular pastime since 1994, we are only now beginning to approach the Web as a research environment. These sites will help the user focus on issues that define the WWW as a research tool and provide guidelines for assessing the different types of information resources found there.

The World Wide Web: Research Strategies and Evaluation
http://faculty.washington.edu/helenew/webeval.html

Understanding and Decoding URLs

Can help you figure out the address of a WWW page, providing you with valuable information about its authority and place of origin. By Elizabeth Kirk, Johns Hopkins University.
http://milton.mse.jhu.edu:8001/research/education/url.html

Other Resources

Bibliographic Formats for Citing Electronic Information
"Citation formats suggested here are based on Li and Crane's Electronic styles: A Handbook for citing electronic information (1996), by Information Today, Inc. For more complete recommendations on bibliographic formats for electronic sources, please refer to Electronic styles."
"The book follows two common citation conventions, APA & MLA, and adds embellishments to represent the unique features of electronic information. "
http://www.uvm.edu/~ncrane/estyles/

Citing Electronic Sources

Compiled by Tom Nichol, Clemens & Alcuin Joint Libraries, College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University, Minnesota
http://www.csbsju.edu/library/internet/citing.html

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 Last Updated:
2/1/00

Contact the instructor at: jwholmes@u.washington.edu

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