TNCC : Learning Resources : Research Guide : Internet Searching

Scope: Basic concepts of the Internet and how to use search engines to locate information.

General search engines can only find a fraction of the sources available online. The following tools will help find those sources normally hidden behind web scripts. Examples of these digital sources include electronic books, online journals, audio files (wav, mp3), images (tiff, gif, jpg), movies (mpeg, quicktime), and reference texts (dictionaries, directories)

About.com Internet for beginners
BUBL LINK - Selected Internet resources covering all academic subject areas.
Delving Deep Inside the Searcher's Mind - Which search engines do searchers prefer and why? How do users use search engines to find the information they want? And how do searchers perceive paid versus free listings? New research offers insights into the workings of the searcher's mind. A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference, August 2-5, 2004, San Jose, CA.
Finding Information on the Internet: A Tutorial (University of California, Berkeley)
Infomine - Scholarly Internet resource collections.
Internet Detective "Wise Up to the Web" - Develop Internet research skills for your university and college work. The tutorial looks at the critical thinking required when using the Internet for research and offers practical advice on evaluating the quality of web sites.
The Internet as a Research Tool includes a section on search engines. (Northwestern University)
Internet Tutorials - contains tutorials on internet, world wide web, and listings of research guides, search engines, and subject directories.
etLingo An online dictionary explaining the technology and community of the world wide web, email, chat, and newsgroups.
Noodletools - Fill in the form on Noodle Quest and it will create a search strategy for your research. Noodle Links is a subject guide to experts' lists of prime resources.
OAIster - Simultaneously searches numerous digital collections. Among the international collections searched are: Caltech Computer Science Technical Reports, A Celebration of Women Writers, Digital Library of the Commons, Ethnologue, Hong Kong University Theses Online, Johnson Space Center Technical Reports.
PEW Internet & American Life Project The Imagining the Internet Predictions Database examines the potential future of the Internet while simultaneously providing a peek back into its history. Includes reports, data, latest trends, user demographics, etc.
Search Engine Showdown, the users' guide to Web searching, compares and evaluates Internet search engines from the searcher's perspective.
Search Engine Watch How they work and how effectively they retrieve results. Also curious statistics about the Internet.
TechEncyclopedia defines over 20,000 terms.