LIB-Web+Searching

There are now millions of pages available on the web, and plenty more sources of information--blogs, wikis, Twitter feeds, PDFs, newsgroups, list-serves, etc--that might have valuable information for a researcher. It's now easy to find information about nearly any topic; but it's also increasingly harder to find great information because there's so much of it out there. Being able to sort through all of this information and quickly find what you want is an essential part of web literacy and is clearly a big part of doing research on the web.

Here's a basic overview of [|how to search the web effectively] from Common Craft.

Another overview, slightly more academic, from [|Babson College], introducing students to web searching, search engines, and how search engines order their findings during a search.

Google's [|guide to web searching]

Great techniques for better searching on Google*

But...There are MANY other search engines out there, and some are a lot better for specific types of searches. Here's [|a guide to a lot of these different search engines] (this is really, really useful).

How to [|search for topics that might be in blogs] (rather than on web pages only)

How to [|search the rest of the web: wikis, blogs and tweets]

Here's a [|new peer-review site] that finds and organizes the best sites for research purposes. This would be incredibly useful for students who are searching for the best sites, rather than having to sift through all that might pop up in a Google search.