Select Search Engines

AltaVista

This engine usually turns up a wealth of references, but many of them are redundant or out of date.

Infoseek Ultra

A fast and thorough search engine.

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.

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 hits 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.