Information Skills Internet Searching the Internet with Google
If you plan your searches in advance you have more chance of finding all that you need so that you will not need to go back online when you realise that you have not got that essential piece of information. Before you even go near the Internet, spend some time thinking about exactly what information you need for your exam or essay.
Start by jotting down words or phrases as they come to mind, as this may help to define exactly what information you need. As your ideas become clearer, try to write a single sentence or search statement which exactly describes what you need to know.
Unfortunately, if you type your search statement into an Internet search engine, you will not get the results that you need. Therefore, you need to transform your search statement into a set of key words or phrases that can be used to carry out a search on the Internet or on a database. A good technique to help you do this it is to underline the keyword or ideas in the sentence, as this will help to split your information need into searchable chunks.
Once you have your list of key words or ideas you will need to make sure that you have all the possible alternative words that could be used to describe your list of ideas. For example, there are several alternative terms for effective (e.g. competent, productive, proficient, capable) and even the Internet can be referred to in several different ways (e.g. Internet, net, www, world-wide-web). To make sure that you cover all the possibilities you need to take into account:
A word having the same or nearly the same meaning as another word or other words in a language.
A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for RAdio Detecting And Ranging.
Once you have a list of all the possibilities, also known as search terms you can then start your search.
Although there are many search engines available on the web and most of them work slightly differently, they often have a simple and an advanced search facility. To help you get used to using these search engine features we are going to have a look at the simple and advanced search features on the Google search engine.
Once you have learnt how to use them on Google, you can try using them on different search engines until you find the one that you are most happy using. Remember, before you even logon to the Internet, you should have planned your search to save you time (and money!) online.
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