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Academic Support - Library and Learning Support
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Internet Search Tools

Contents:

Searching the Internet

Tutorials

How to Search the Internet

Internet Detective
A free online tutorial that will help you develop internet research skills for your university and college work. The tutorial looks at the critical thinking required when using the internet for research and offers practical advice on evaluating the quality of web sites.

Intute - Virtual Training Suite
Provides free internet tutorials to help you learn how to get the best from the web for your education and research.

Guides

The Best Search Tools Chart
Produced by Infopeople, presents the best features of some popular search engines, meta-search engines and subject directories.

Evaluating Web Sites

Anyone can publish anything on the internet so evaluating the information you have found is essential. The following web sites guide you through the criteria to consider when evaluating websites.

Evaluating Web Sites covers the scope, accuracy, authority, currency, usability and searching facilities of web sites.

Berkeley Library (University of California) explains what information can be gathered from the website URL, how to check if the page is linked onto other websites, if it appears in a reputable directory which evaluates its contents, and how to look up the author's name.

Intute - the best Web resources for education and research
Intute is a free online service providing you with a database of hand selected Web resources for education and research.

Netskills - Athens personal account required. Further information.

net.TUTOR offers a tutorial on how to assess the purpose of a site, its author, content, coverage, currency and recognition, from The Ohio State University Libraries.

Evaluating Internet Sites for Academic Use a list of characteristics which can distinguish reliable websites from dubious ones.

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Meta-Search Engines

(sites that enable multiple or parallel searching of other Internet search tools)

Ask Jeeves
A natural language search engine which provides a list of related topics and ranks sponsored web sites at the top of the results page.

Beaucoup!
Provides access by category up to a claimed 2,500 search engines, catalogues and directories. Sponsored web sites are listed at the top of the results page.

Ixquick
Searches 12 search engines simultaneously including AllTheWeb, Ask Jeeves, Google, Yahoo. Results are ranked by relevance and quality, with number of hits for each search engine. Sponsored web sites are listed at the top of the results page.

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Search Engines

(to locate Web pages that match your search term/s)

AltaVista UK
A full text index to over 30 million web pages and 13,000 news groups. Sponsored web sites are listed at the top of the results page.

Google
Results are ranked by number of references to them as well as by matching search term(s). Sponsored web sites are listed on the right-hand side of the results page.

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Subject Gateways

These are collections of links about particular subject areas maintained by UK academics or experts in particular areas under careful editorial control. Subject gateways will, in general, include some searching facilities but are more useful for research based on the hierarchies within the subject areas.

Bournemouth University Subject Resources provide relevant web sites for most subjects.

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