The following article has been taken from Q&A! E-mail Newsletter (© 2006 Questia Media, Inc. All rights reserved.)
Search engines that help organize your research strategy.
Not much to do and lots of time to wander around the Internet? Then don't read this article. But if your time is short and you're under pressure to find critical information for your paper, class, project or job, then read on to learn how search engines work systematically to get you where you need to go... fast.
According to the Jamail Center for Legal Research at
Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas at
Austin,"Search engines are tools that find Internet
sites containing particular text or specific images
(coming soon �? search engines that locate
particular sounds or bits of music)."
They explain:
"Just about every search engine employs technology that matches search terms to terms in a document (with many complex variations on this single theme). Once the search engine has retrieved documents containing the user-specified text, the search engine ranks the sites retrieved. Ranking mechanisms vary greatly among search engines and are what distinguish one search engine from another (it's not difficult to find sites that contain particular characters in a specific order �? what's hard is figuring out which of the sites retrieved will be most useful to the user).
"Search engines often allow users to manipulate retrieved items based on what characteristic a user finds most helpful. The trend in search engine technology is toward the development of automatic "personalization" systems �? the search engine would automatically personalize the retrieved results based on information the search engine has gleaned about the user.
"Some search engines allow users to look for particular images. Image-searching mechanisms are not nearly as sophisticated as text-searching tools.
"Meta-search engines are tools that gather the results of a particular query submitted to several search engines. Meta-search engines are useful in locating sites that concern esoteric subjects, but are less helpful in locating the "best" site on any one topic.
Web directories
Web directories organize Internet sites into subject area groups. Web directories may incorpoate serach engines in their sites, but their value and uniqueness lie in their organization of the Internet's content.
Use the Google Scholar search below: