Searching on the Internet: Search Engines

Searches on the World Wide Web are conducted by powerful computer programs called search engines. Some of them also search through some of the databases listed Understanding Where the Information Is: Databases; others look only at Webpages (for titles and keywords) or at specific areas of the Internet. Not only are search engines fast, some of them are quite sophisticated in their methods-- for example, helping you to find other Websites similar to the one listed, or allowing you to pose a question.

The best way to find information quickly is to use a metasearcher which will search through a number of search engines simultaneously and organize the results. The same query will bring up different results from different search engines, so from the metasearcher's results you may find that one search engine is better for your topic-and for refining your search. Metasearchers also save you time because they modify your phrases according to the rules of each specific search engine. See Meta-searchers for descriptions and addresses.

Searching by Subject

One way to get plenty of information on your topic is to move through narrower and narrower lists of subject headings on the Web. For example, with the search engine Magellan (http://www.magellan), clicking on the subject "education" then under "education" to "higher education" then to "distance learning" gets a list of 29 Websites addressing the subject of distance learning in higher education. You can then scroll through the list and click on each one that interests you.