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........ "Using the Web" Activities     Part 3: Locating Outstanding World Wide Web Resources Using the Web: Tools and Strategies for Successful Web Research Overview Locating a particular piece of information from the thousands and thousands of web sites out there takes specific skill: knowledge of the available search engines and how they work as well as specific strategies to target your search and speed up the search process. The following activities help you learn the strengths of different search engines and show you how focusing your search can give you faster results. Step 1: Review what you have learned about search engines and Web site directories. Visit Internet Tutorials (http://www.albany.edu/library/internet/) and click on "How to Choose a Search Engine or Directory" or "Searching the Internet: Recommended Sites and Search Techniques" to learn about the differences between search directories and search engines and when to use each tool. Step 2: Participate in interactive Web search tutorials. Go to Searching for Information on the Web (http://www.exsmo.com/ESHSlibrary/Internet%20Basics/Search%20Tutorial.htm). Scroll down the page until you find practice exercises using search indexes. These exercises give you hands-on opportunities to conduct Web searches and experiment with different search engines, syntax, and criteria. Click on selected practice exercises to find everything from images of Mickey Mouse to recipes of sweet potato pie. Be sure to use the "Hints" to view model search techniques. Step 3: Conduct a Web search on a topic of your own interest. Think of a topic of interest to you, and brainstorm keywords to describe or define that topic. Visit Preparing Your Search http://home.sprintmail.com/~debflanagan/prepare.html to help you. First, conduct a general search of the topic using a search directory such as Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/) Explore several of the retrieved Web sites, comparing content, relevance, quality, etc. Using the same topic, conduct a highly focused search using a search engine such as AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/). Again, explore and compare several of the retrieved Web sites. For your selected topic, which Web search tool proved to be the most helpful? Why do you think so?     Copyright © 2001 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.