Find Information

With billions of pages, you could spend a lifetime hunting for specific information. So where do you start? Searching the Web requires part skill, part luck and a little bit of art.

Understanding how to perform sophisticated searches of online information will greatly increase your chances of finding what you want. Popular search engines let you define search criteria in very specific ways, but not all function identically.

Anyone with a computer and Internet access can become an electronic publisher. While the Web explodes with information, it also poses a vexing problem: What is the quality of the information?

Although search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo! index billions of web pages and other electronic documents, this represents only a tiny part of the total information available on the World Wide Web. To unearth the buried treasure, understand how to mine the data.

Many tools exist on the Internet to help you discover primary and secondary sources of information. The first thing to ask is "what kind of information do I need?"

Gopher, FTP, WAIS, Archie, Veronica, Jughead are older tools for searching and retrieving files on the Internet. With the development of the World Wide Web, you really don't need to know the gory details of how to use these anymore, but in case you're interested, find out.