Search Engines and Directories

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Search Engines and Directories

Families and Health--HPER F656

To help you with the task of hunting through the Web for usable resources, we're providing you with some information on searching on the web. First, the process is different from searching in a library. The following resources suggest methods of approaching an inernet search that take into account these differences:

How to Use Web Search Engines," by Linda Barlow, at http://www.monash.com/spidap4.html
Internet Navigator - Internet Catalogs or Directories, at http://sol.slcc.edu/lr/navigator/discovery/catalogs.html)

In doing your search, you will use directories and search engines. The difference I describe below are, in fact, somewhat artificial. Search engines and directories were once distinctly different; some search engines now have a cataloguing function and directories allow for some searching.

A search engine is an automatic search robot or "spider" that allows the user to search the Web, looking for specific words in the document. This may result in an immense number of pages being returned, especially if the word is a common one. For example, a request in one search engine for pages with the term "family" in them generated 1,358,089 "hits" (i.e., pages that were identified as containing that word). In another search engine, only 478,040 pages were found, but this obviously is still too many. With the second search enging, using Boolean logic (e.g., using AND, OR, NOT to clarify), the term "family AND health" generated 83,944. Another search in which I entered "family AND health AND mental" further reduced it to 14,860. A final search of "family AND health AND mental NOT illness" reduced it to 1,1251 hits. From the brief description that accompanied the links, many of these were clearly commercial, others were only regionally relevant, and many could be eliminated quickly.

A selection of search engines I have liked include:

Hotbot, at http://www.hotbot.com
Excite, at http://www.excite.com
Lycos, at http://www.lycos.com
Altavista, at http://altavista.digital.com

Search engines vary in terms of how useful they will be to you and you may need to test a few to see which best fit your needs. A possible alternative is a meta-search engine. These activate several search engines simultaneously and can help you to find individual search engines that may be of use to you. I have found the following meta-search engines to be helpful. Incidentally, the latter two were created by the same person.

Inference Find!, at http://www.inference.com/ifind/
Metafind, at http://search.metafind.com/
Dogpile, at http://dogpile.com (even with its odd name, this one is worth testing)

A directory is web site that operates much like a subject catalogue in the library. For the directory, people have gone through other sites and have determined the quality of a site, using some sort of evaluation criteria. Useful directories include:

Librarian's Index to the Internet, at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/InternetIndex/
Yahoo!, at http://www.yahoo.com/
Britannica Internet Guide, at http://www.ebig.com/
Forum One, at http://www.ForumOne.com/
A variety of links to resources can be found at Around the Web in eighty minutes, at http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/RoundWeb/roundweb.html

Finally, an assortment of search engines and directories are collected at these sites:

Web Search Tools & Directories, at http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/resource/search-list.html
Needle in a CyberStack - the InfoFinder, at http://home.revealed.net/albee/
Subject.com, at http://www.iTools.com/research-it/research-it.html

If you have not tested any of these links, do so now. Choose a topic related to families and health and see what comes up. In your search, you may question the quality of the site. The next page in this sequence, Evaluating Websites, addresses that issue. The final page in this sequence, Writing Tools, including citation style, offers a selection of tools that can be used as you write up the information you get from web resources.

Any questions? Contact the course developer and professor, Kathleen Gilbert, at gilbertk@indiana.edu.
Link to the course site map, at http://www.indiana.edu/~hperf656/spring98/sitemap.html.
Connect to the course main page

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For information about this work, please contact Kathleen Gilbert at gilbertk@indiana.edu. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce and distribute copies of this work for non-profit educational purposes, provided that copies are distributed at or below cost, and that the author, source, and copyright notice are included on each copy. This permission is in addition to rights of reproduction granted under Sections 107, 108, and other provisions of the U.S. Copyright Act. Before making any distribution of this work, please contact Kathleen Gilbert to ascertain whether you have the current version.