NSW HSC Online Professional Development Node
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Search tools
The Internet is growing at an explosive rate, as is the volume of information now available on the Internet. To effectively harness Internet resources we need to be able to locate specific information quickly. Fortunately a variety of resources exist on the Internet which allow us to easily search for any given information.
Search tools help us locate the desired information more quickly and comprehensively. Helpful sites that include information on how best to search the Internet are the University at Albany Libraries 
and University of South Carolina Beaufort Library . They are well worth exploring especially the links on how to search the web. The Department of Education Employment and Training Victoria a site on research on the Internet.
Computer-created search sites
Search engines are often called "spiders", "robots", "bots" or "crawlers" and they visit web sites in order to create catalogues of web pages. These run automatically from page to page, site to site indexing and cataloguing web pages.
Computer-created catalogues are created ‘automatically’ without human interaction and often have information not listed in the directories. A search engine can sometimes supply incorrect or useless information due to web-page builder’s strategies. A site or web page can be noticed by a search engine by it’s title, meta details or content, and by 'stuffing' these areas with as many keywords as possible, the site could well be catalogued incorrectly. Another content 'stuffing' strategy is to have text at the bottom of a page, in the same colour as the background, with the keywords typed over and over.
Examples of computer created search sites:
Human-organised search sites
Unlike search engines humans create directories. Site information must be submitted, and then assigned to an appropriate category. Because of this human role directories often provide better results than search engines. A search engine based on human judgement is often best. Why? Because unlike a computer-created search site a human-organised search tool won’t throw everything remotely associated with the topic at you. More and more the top search sites are going to human indexing. Unlike indexes created by computers, humans can judge data for relevance and categorise them in ways that are useful to you.
Examples of human organised search sites:
Hybrid search sites
Hybrid sites generally are humans supplemented by computer indexes. This is so that you can have the best of both worlds. A lot of the principal sites are now hybrid.
Examples of hybrid search sites:
Metasearch sites
Metasearch sites send your query to several other different search tools and compile the results. This presents the broadest view.
Examples of metasearch sites:
For further information about search engines, visit the Search Engine Watch site. This site contains a large amount of information about the types of search tools, techniques in using search tools and ways in which you can utilise you resources.
Where do we go to locate the required material?
Unfortunately there is no one global search engine/directory on the Internet that will search everywhere. Many search engines conduct their searches in the traditional way by mirroring library catalogues using keywords and author indexes. Other search engines conduct searches on headings, the entire content or just the documents title and metadata.
Further Information
So which is the best search tool?
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