Internet Searching Strategies

Ray Ontko
Department of Computer Science
Earlham College

Internet Searching Strategies identified in class, 1997/09/12.

• Browse. Visit pages you think might be there (e.g., www.intel.com), or that you find with a search engine. Follow links from those pages.
• Subject pages. Find subject index pages (like the one Jim found, The WWW Virtual Library - Computing) and use this to help define terms for searches or to find links to related pages.
• Links to a page. Use the search engines to find all pages that have links to a given page which you already find useful.
• Newsgroups. Use the search engines to search newsgroups. You may find a FAQ, or the names of people who are active in your area of research.
• Authors. Search for the names of authors in your field of specialty to find out what else they might be doing, and who else might be referencing them.
• Correlated Search Terms. Using Alta Vista's correlated search term feature ("Refine"), look for other terms that might better describe your area of research. Also, look for new keywords on the pages you find that are useful.