Effective Information Gathering: An example of how to research a Biology Essay

The Internet - Time to Surf the World Wide Web

The Internet has made a huge range of information easily accessible. As there is so much information available online, it can be difficult to find exactly what you are looking for.

How to search 'smarter' on the Internet

A number of techniques can be used to improve Internet searching. They include:

1. Quotes. The search engine looks for web pages that contain the exact phrase within the quotes, e.g. "genetic engineering"
2. The plus sign (+). The search engine looks for web pages that contain all the words that have a plus sign in front of them. The order of the words is not restricted. There is no space between the plus sign and the word it precedes, e.g. ‘"genetic engineering"+human’
3. The minus sign (-). The search engine discards web pages that include the word preceded by a minus sign. The order of the terms is not restricted. There is no space between the minus sign and the word it precedes, e.g. ‘"genetic engineering"-human’
4. Redefine your search terms to improve your results. This can improve the returned matches. Think about what you are trying to find. Is it known by another name or phrase?
5. Try other Internet search engines. It is possible to search more than one Internet sites at a time. Internet cross-searches are available that search many search engines at one time. A few examples of these are: Metacrawler (www.metacrawler.com) and CNET Search (http://www.search.com).

Example

Rachel uses Google (http://www.google.com), one of the most popular search engines. She looks at her list of keywords to use for searching. Rachel searches for genetic engineering -- Google returns 3,710, 000 sites. She starts to work through the results but finds that she is spending a lot of time digging through useless and unrelated information.

Rachel tries to improve her search results and redefines her search terms to search the phrase "genetic engineering"+human. Different websites are returned when using these new search terms. She still finds many websites are found that are not useful to her. What now?

Further Work

1. Think of a recent topic you were asked to research. Identify the major themes and define suitable keywords. Use these keywords to search on the Internet and see what results are generated when you use quotes, plus or minus signs, or a combination of these, in the search engine.
2. Try out an Internet cross-search engine and see if you find any useful information. Your lecturer, tutor, librarian or fellow students may know of other Internet cross-search engines that you can try.