1. How to Download Media Sources
2. Resources for Creating Multimedia Projects
3. Saving and Using Web Pages
4. Searching the Internet
5. Expanding Your Searching Toolkit
6. Issues Associated with Internet Use

General Tips

Quotation marks: Sometimes you can add characters to your words or phrases to more closely define your intentions for the search engine.  Enclosing a multiword phrase in quotation marks tells the search engine to list only sites that contain those words in that exact order. For example, if a query asks for water cycles  rather than “water cycles”, then the responses will be for the words water  and cycles  separately, in addition to the coupled words.

Plus and minus signs: If you type a plus sign (+) directly in front of a word, you are indicating that the word or phrase must appear in the search results (for example, Hotels+San+Francisco).  Similarly, a minus sign (-) indicates that the word or phrase should not be included in the search results (Cars-Ford).

Boolean operators: Boolean operators include AND, OR, AND NOT, and parentheses.  To work, these operators must appear in ALL CAPS and with a space on each side.

AND - Similar to the plus sign,  AND indicates that the documents found must contain all the words joined by the AND operator.  For example, to find documents that contain the words biology, and cells,  enter biology AND cells .

OR - Documents found must contain at least one of the words joined by OR.  For example, to find documents that contain the word precipitation  or the word rain,  enter precipitation OR  rain.

AND NOT - Similar to the minus sign, using AND NOT indicates that the documents found cannot contain the word that follows the term AND NOT.  For example, to find documents that contain the word precipitation but not the word snow,  enter precipitation AND NOT  snow.

Parenthesis - Parentheses are used to group portions of Boolean queries together for more complicated queries.  For example, to find documents that contain the word fruit  and either the word banana or the word apple, enter fruit AND (banana OR  apple )

Title search - This feature enables you to restrict searches to the title portion of web documents.  For example,  typing title:Mars or t:Mars will retrieve all documents that have the word Mars  in their title.

Planning and Conducting a Search

This section recommends ways of conducting a search in an orderly and informed way.  For those just beginning to learn the search process, use the following guidelines:

• Develop a general understanding of the available search tools, process and language.  Become familar with a couple of different search engines.
• In the beginning avoid searching for obscure information not likely to be found without using complex search methods.
• In keyword searches, start by working with no more than two or three search tools until you gain mastery over them.  Learn how to best compose a query and focus the search.

Searching By Keyword

• For search queries that do not require operators, such as a single term or proper names, use a keyword search engine such as AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com)  or HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com) or Google (http://www.google.com).
• For queries that employ a phrase, use quotes to enclose the phrase.  This will reduce the number of hits considerably and improve the relevancy.

Directory  (Subject Search)

Some search engines provide a subject list when their home page is displayed.  Try Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com).  For searching for a subject list provided, choose and click a category of your interest to follow.  Choose increasingly more specific titles until there are no more options of interest offered.  Scroll through the references or hits, and click on a hit that interest you to access the reference.

Conducting Moderately Complex Searches

• For a convenient way to conduct a moderately complex search, employ search engines that have a common set of operators.  Quote Marks (“ “); (+) sign; (-) sign; and the Boolean operators such as  AND, OR, AND NOT and parentheses.
• Hotbot (http://www.hotbot.com), AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/), Go.com; (http://infoseek.go.com/) and Excite (http://www.excite.com) use these common set of operators.
• Use lower case except with proper names.  Proper names are capitalized and separated by commas.
• For quick and efficient searches use a multi-engine search tool such as Metacrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com)
• Google (http://google.com) An excellent all around universal search engine.

Using a new Computational Knowledge Engine

WolframAlpha - Computational Knowledge Engine New

• To speed up your searches, bookmark your favorite search engine tools for future use.  Also, bookmark useful sites during your search, so that you can find your way back to them.
• To speed up your search of multiple search engines compose a query using Common Operators, and type it into the search box.  Copy the query onto the Clipboard for later use.  Click on search and evaluate the hits.  Scroll to the next search engine, and paste the query into the location box.  Click search and evaluate the hits.  Repeat this process for each search engine of interest.