Learning+to+Search+Smarter

If you find yourself overwhelmed with all the information you can find on google or bing, or perhaps you think its 1998 and you use answers.com or jeeves.... This page was written to help you organize your searching.

Know that search engines drop any words like "What" so no need to ever type in a full question unless you like extra work.

Determine what your key terms are. Perhaps you are looking for an answer to "what was the impact of WWI on Japan?" What should you google? Japan is too big, so is WWI, so put BOTH terms in your url (search box at the top right of your screen currently.) What other words are important in that question? impact? go ahead and see if that helps you get some more specific sites for your topic!

So, you have 380,000,000 sites to search through. How to know which ones are good?

1. Wikipedia is a nice place to start, but a really bad place to finish your search. Wikipedia is getting better and better (way better than answer.com or yahoo answers -which are for the truly search illiterate), but Wikipedia can sometimes be too overwhelming or just plain wrong. One really nice thing about wikipedia is at the bottom of the page is a bibliography (just like the one you are creating) that link all the online sources they got their info (keeps them honest and helps you do your own research), you can use these links to find great sources of information.

2. There are search engines designed for high school students doing school research. Yes. You are not the only person on earth suffering through a research paper.

wha World History Archives. Divided by topics, some great stuff here for certain topics...you will only know if you search.

iSeek These guys are pretty good, the organization chart on the left can be really helpful to narrow your search down.

googlescholar This is just scholarly publications...might be some challenging reading, but you will find the very best info on the web about whatever topic you are looking for.

googlebooks is the same as above but just in books. That is right, entire library books have been scanned and are now online. This will be useful for your bibliography...

ipl The internet public library is great for some subjects, librarians have created collections of great sites for your research.

list This is a very comprehensive list of search engines for research projects.

3. When searching, read the little blurb that is visible to you so that you can see what it is all about before taking the time to click the site. If using google and you click "cached" you can go directly to your search terms that will be highlighted on the website.

4. Surf responsibly. There is a lot of random crud out there. For your research paper only use the best sites (.edu .gov .org and some .com), don't waste your time clicking through garbage.

Search smarter, not harder.