Directories
Directories (also termed "indexes") are created by a staff of editors who visit and evaluate web sites, and then organize them into subject-based categories and sub-categories. Currently, the most popular directory is Yahoo. For a listing of additional directories please visit the section Search Engines & Directories.

Search Engines
Search Engines are computer programs that search documents for specified keywords and return a list of the documents where the keywords were found. For example, after entering a keyword into a search engine and clicking the "search" button a search engine will then collect sites from the Internet that contain the particular keyword(s) or phrase you have entered. Search engines can include large amounts of information. A search engine such as Google is composed of an enourmous database of over 1,346,966,000 pages, and can regularly retrieve hundreds of thousands results. For a listing of additional directories please visit the section Search Engines & Directories.

Searching Tips
The World Wide Web is extremely vast, containing billions of web pages. The success of your search depends on many factors, including:
a) Your ability to find matches to your terms and the terms in the documents you are searching for;
b) The database you use (i.e. different search engines produce different results); and
c) Your comprehension of the database in question. Remember, spending a brief period of time reading the instructions on using a particular search engine or directory will improve your search results dramatically, as well as save you time, in the future. Also, by clicking here (PDF File) you will be provided with a one page quick guide to using the major search engines.

Other factors to consider when searching, include:
a) Be careful when searching with common terms. Do not search an education database with the term "education."
b) Using quotation marks around phrases often insures that those words contained within the quotation marks will remain together on all the documents retrieved ("computer science," "we the people of the united states").
c) Using a plus sign (+) directly prior to a search term will ensure that that particular search term must be included in the results that the search engine retrieves ("+rushdie +booker").
c) Using a minus sign (-) directly prior to a search term will ensure that that particular search term will not be included in the results that the search engine retrieves ("-led +zepplin").

To view a list of internet search engines and directories «click here»
Return to Internet Training and Tutorials section «click here»