Finding Internet Web Sites
The Internet includes a wide range of resources; some of them very scholarly and academic, and others that are not. The Library can help you use the Internet effectively by guiding you to the good resources, helping you search more efficiently, and showing you how to evaluate what you find.
Internet Resources Selected by Librarians
- Ready Reference Shelf - the librarians at UT have put together a list of Internet resources that we find useful at our Reference Desk, organized by broad subject categories.
- Subject Guides - UT librarians have also created subject guides to resources within Carlson Library and on the Internet.
- Librarians' Index to the Internet - Selected by a group of California librarians, this searchable directory lists great resources in a wide variety of categories.
Searching the Internet
Some familiar examples of search engines include
Google,
Yahoo and
Ask. Search engines gather websites to include in their database using an electronic "spider" that crawls the web looking for new websites, updates current sites, or deletes obsolete sites. Search engines index every word on the web pages they know about, so they are more comprehensive than directories. However, this also means that they may find a lot of irrelevant pages. Results are displayed in order of relevance (or the number of times the words appear in the website). The exception to this rule is Google, which ranks the results by the number of times other sites have linked to them. A separate
guide is available for two Google research tools,
Google Book Search &
Google Scholar
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Tips for improving your search engine results:
- Put words in "quotation marks" if you want them to be searched as a phrase (next to each other).
- Put a minus sign (-) in front of words or phrases that you want to exclude from your results.
- Use the advanced searching features to limit to a specific domain, such as: gov, org, edu.
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Meta-search engines: Some examples of meta-search engines include Dogpile, MetaCrawler, and Clusty. Meta-search engines search the content of several individual search engines and then show the top results from each. Many of the meta-search engines list the most relevant first, but can be changed to list them by search engine.
Evaluating Web Information
It is important to remember that anyone can put up a web page, and there is no 'quality control' or editor for what you find on the Internet. Therefore, you must be ready to make your own evaluation of web sites, especially if you are going to be using them for research purposes. You will want to find out as much as you can about the authority, currency, relevance, and accuracy of the web sites you use. These checklists and other resources will help you ask the right questions.
