Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Selecting a Tool for Your Search


This post offers general guidelines to get you started on your search of the Web. It is important to think about your information need before selecting a search tool. To help you do this, the chart below lists different kinds of questions, information needs and preferences that you may have. These are organized into categories that list a sample of tools that you should try.
This will help you select search tools based on particular features that can help you find what you want.

Query Types

Examples

What to use

  • Your topic is general
  • You want to view a collection of sites recommended by experts
  • You want to browse the possibilities
  • You want a limited number of high-quality results
  • I'm doing research on drug abuse
  • Subject Directories, especially academic and professional
  • Some general queries might be helped by the next group of options below
  • You want results organized into concept clusters rather than one long list of results
  • You are doing in-depth research that includes an exploration of several subtopics
  • You want a better understanding of the scope of your topic
  • You are unfamiliar with your topic
  • I'm doing research on discrimination
  • Search engines that offer searches on similar documents in the results list, or provide a hyperlinked list of alternative topics for retrieving related results: AltaVista,, Ask.com, Google, Ixquick
  • Your topic is narrow and limited in scope
  • You are looking for specific site/fact/individual/event, etc.
  • Your topic consists of more than one concept
  • Your topic is obscure
  • You are looking for a specific domain, file type, geographic location, etc.
  • I'm doing research on age discrimination
  • I'm researching civil rights in Turkey
  • I'm looking for the site of the Society of American Registered Architects
  • I'm looking for information about Nelson Mandela from South Africa
  • You are looking for the appropriate search terms
  • Your search terms are ambiguous
  • What search terms should I use to investigate my topic?
  • How can I learn about bridge?
  • Thesaurus-creating search engine: SurfWax
  • You are looking for dynamically-changing information
  • You are looking for very recent information
  • You are looking for non-textual files such as software, graphics, multimedia, documents in PDF format,etc
  • You are looking for information usually stored in a database such as a directory, phone book, etc.
  • I need today's stock price for Microsoft
  • I want to search news stories from yesterday
  • I want to see a photo of the World Trade Center
  • I need a list of lawyers in Albany, N.Y.
  • I want to research the laws of California on computer crime
  • Deep Web sources:

0 comments: