HOW TO SEARCH FOR INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET
Searching for information online is one of the most important duties in your study of philosophy. It is one of the sources of your personally researched information. Really, there is an extremely vast resource of information on the internet on virtually every topic. However, if you have not learnt the skill of researching information on the internet, you may not be able to fully enjoy all what it has got to offer. Most people think that carrying out a search on the internet is simply going to Google and typing the question. Hey! This is nothing close to real Internet research. Do you know that there are thousands of subject directories which are hidden from the view of search engine robots (like that of Google)? This hidden part of the internet is known as the ‘invisible web’. According to some recent survey, it is estimated that taken altogether, the major search engines cover only about 40 percent of the total number of web pages, and no single search engine covers more than 15 to 20 percent. This means that the ‘invisible web’ carries about 60 percent of the total website information. In other words, no matter how popular Google or Wikipedia could be, they cannot give you all you really need as you need more than one search engine to get very good information. This is the reason why sometimes or rather most times, when you try to surf the net, you do not really get anything quite satisfactory.
Search Engines
Search engines are quite a number and they differ in terms of their collection, searching, arrangement and presentation of information from their databases; so, it is always better to consult more than one search engine for better results. Various search engines (of which you may never have heard of some before) are presented below;
· www.google.com -whenever you use Google, it is best to use the ‘advanced search option’. This has a pull down menu with features that allow searchers to find academic data of various kinds and formats.
· www.yahoo.com· www.ask.com
· www.wotbox.com
· www.excite.com
· home.microsoft.com
· www.gigablast.com
·
Metacrawlers
Consulting more than one search engine at once could be rather tasking and cash consuming (except one has some private access to the internet). Accordingly, metacrawlers or metasearchers have been created to simplify the work of researchers by helping them to use multiple search engines at the same time. How? What metacrawlers actually do is act as an intermediary by sending the search term to various search engines and then arranging the results according to the various search engines. So, it aids in searching multiple search engines at the same time. Therefore, metacrawlers perform better than search engines themselves. Various metacrawlers (of which you may never have heard of some before) are presented below;
· www.metacrawler.com· www.kartoo.com
· www.search.com
Virtual Libraries
It is a fact that anybody can post anything on the internet. Accordingly, when the search engines bring you information, it is not all of them that scrutinize the quality of the sources that they present. This is why you could at times find something odd or even silly when making a very important search. So, some information professionals have worked hard to provide a platform for researchers to locate reliable information on the internet. To this effect, virtual libraries have been created. A virtual library operates just the way a traditional library operates; the only difference is the fact that it is online (that is why it is called virtual). Normally, it is not just any book that is placed in an academic or school library, as any book coming in would first be validated by a library authority. Such formality is the same with virtual libraries. A virtual library also has the potential to help you locate resources on the invisible web, which are often overlooked by most search engines. Some available virtual libraries are given below;
· www.lii.org (‘lii’ means ‘librarian’s index to the internet’)· www.invisible-web.net (the invisible web directory)
· www.vlib.org (‘vlib’ means ‘virtual library’)
· www.ipl.org (‘ipl’ means ‘internet public library’)
