Searching the free web!                                

   First, a few words of caution...

When you use the "free" Web, usually there are no filters between you and what appears on the screen.   Anybody can put out anything for free access through the Internet!  As a consequence, in your search results you'll find excellent sites right next to questionable ones.  The task of weeding through is not always very easy and can be very time consuming and frustrating. 

Another problem with Web searching is that Web pages are not indexed in any standard way like a library catalog or a periodical index is (by subject, author, title, etc).  Finding information sometimes can be difficult with a single search returning sometimes hundreds of thousands of results. In this lesson we will learn some techniques that can help make your searches more precise; still keep in mind that your Web results may be overwhelming.

The search guides or search engines we are going to discuss below are anything but comprehensive or current of what is available over the Web.  A lot of the information you find may already be dated, since indexing of new or updated sites by these search engines may take months.

Finally, keep in mind that most of the "free" Web is mainly commercial and that's where most of its financial success stories have come from!

   Here are some things you might want to consider before you embark on your Web search:

I.  Is the "free" web the right place for you?

Although web searching can be exciting, before you start a serious project, especially for your college work, ask yourself: will my topic be most likely covered in the free and unregulated market of the World Wide Web, or is it better and easier to first use more "traditional" type of sources such as articles, books, etc?  Keep in mind that at least for the time being professionals are still more likely to web sources.

However, the free web can also be a powerful tool to use depending on the nature of your interest or research.  For example, some areas where the free web is particularly strong include:

• consumer information on topics such as health or business related issues, for example, stock prices
• entertainment  - want to find the latest film reviews or what's showing at your downtown movie theater?
• government information - with the introduction of the Internet we have witnessed a huge growth in the number of government publications available now electronically. Remember here that the U.S. government is the biggest aggregator of statistical information a lot of which is freely accessible through the web.
• recent research (research not yet published in journals)
• online communities for people who share interests, including blogs, wikis, chat, etc.
• news and current events
• archival/digitized collections

II. What's the difference between "search engines" and "subject guides"?

In order to have better success in you Internet searching you should understand the difference of the various search tools available.  Specifically, Search Engines like Google are very different from Subject Guides like Scirus.  Let me be more clear:

Search Engines are usually built by robots, sometimes called "spiders." These are computer programs that go out on the web to find new sites, delete or update old ones for their home databases, and log the words on each page.  

The collection of sites you search with a search engines is usually quite large and varies in quality. When you do a word search in a search engine, the database scans its collection of sites for the words you typed and returns those (often thousands!) containing these word(s). In other words, most search engines are not able to perform a "subject" or concept-based search - they can only do a "word" search (remember what we discussed before about word searches and their disadvantages?)

To see a selective list of Search Engines, go to the Campus Library homepage and under Research Tools click on More>> and then Search the "fee" web. 

As you probably already know, Google has been the one dominating the scene among other competitive search engines praised for its high relevancy of results. 

Subject Guides are are entirely different from Search Engines.  These search tools are the closest thing to library catalogs, with sites collected and organized in various subject areas by humans.  They are sometimes called "trees" because you may start your search by clicking on a general category and then branch out to subcategories, topics, and subtopics.

Do keep in mind that since their sites are "hand picked,"  Subject Guides offer smaller collections of sites to search than Search Engines; however, if your topic is included, they usually return higher quality results.  To see a selective list of Subject Guides, go to the Campus Library homepage and under Research Tools click on More>> and then Search the "fee" web. Note that Academic Info, Infomine and Scirus are subject guides specializing in academic web resources.

Beyond the above distinction, there are also what I call "hybrid" search tools that combine the features of search engines and subject guides, one of the most recent and already quite popular being the Google Scholar. This is a version of the company's search service, Google (i.e., material accessible via Google Scholar can also be in the main Google index). According to the company's statement, the new search engine limits its results to "scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports." However, Google officials have not yet explained how they determine exactly what material counts as scholarly, or how Google Scholar decides which results are more relevant than others. Content in Google Scholar comes from a wide range of academic publishers, professional societies, universities, and scholarly articles across the Web. In some cases Google Scholar also searches the full text of an article but users will either have to have a subscription to the content or pay for access to an individual article.