Searching Tips
Many searches turn up thousands of "hits" because the default searching
strategy is to return sites that any of your search terms appear in at any
point (i.e. they behave as though OR connects your search terms).
To pare down the numbers to an acceptable
number use the logical operator AND between all of your
search terms. In AltaVista and Infoseek use + before
any term to ensure that it is included in the selections.
Sometimes it is helpful to restrict the search to university sites only
by including +.edu in your search terms.
Use the wildcard operator * to deal with variants in the form and spelling
of key terms - e.g., col*r will find sites with both British and American
spellings.
Use quotation marks to search for phrases - e.g., "course description".
Once you have clicked onto a site and want to find the relevant section of
the document use the Find button on your browser to search for the keyword.
Selected Search Engines
- Infoseek Ultra
- A fast and thorough search engine. My current first choice.
- AltaVista
- This engine usually turns up a wealth of references, but many of them are redundant
or out of date.
- Yahoo
- A well organized database of references, selected by humans rather than bots.
- MetaCrawler
- Submits your search to many services simultaneously and returns the results
in a nicely formatted and well documented manner.
Wading through the screeds of information, turning up little other than lists
of links or course descriptions can be frustrating. The way around this time sink
is to let others do the surfing. In psychology this means using an index like
PsychCrawler. In my travels I turned up a site that might serve the same purpose
for literary and cultural studies: Web-Cite.
Another source of research materials for the lists-of-links weary is
Electric
Library. This service costs $9.95 a month, but you can try it out free for two
weeks.