Quick Tips

This will help you about when you should use what.

When should I use a subject directory?

• When you have a broad topic or idea to research
• When you want to see a list of sites on your topic often recommended and annotated by experts
• When you want to look around in a controlled environment
• When you want to retrieve a list of sites relevant to your topic, rather than numerous individual pages contained within these sites
• When you want to search for the site title, annotation and (if available) assigned keywords to retrieve relevant material rather than the full text of a document
• When you want to avoid viewing low-content documents that often turn up on search engines.

When should I use a search engine?

• When you have a narrow or obscure topic or idea to research
• When you are looking for a specific site
• When you want to search the full text of millions of pages
• When you want to retrieve a large number of documents on your topic
• When you want to search for particular types of documents, file types, source locations, languages, date last modified, etc.
• When you want to take advantage of newer retrieval technologies such as concept clustering, ranking by popularity, link ranking, and so on

When should I use the deep Web?

• When you want dynamically changing content such as the latest news, job postings, available airline flights, etc.
• When you want to find information that is normally stored in a database, such as a phone book listing, listings of lawyers, doctors, plants etc., searchable collections of laws, geographical and company data, and so on.

Here are sample topics and the tools you should use to retrieve information about them. This rule is not absolute, but should give you some general guidelines about how to approach subject directories and search engines as research tools.