Searching For Web Information

After you have completed the Finding Web Information module you will:

• Understand the construction of webpages
• Know ways to use search engines for efficient searching
• Utilize methods to locate information not contained within search engines
• Understand the concept of "the invisible web"

While Google is one of the best methods to broadly search what is on the web, it doesn't contain all of the information that is available on the web. Some webpages don't contain the information (called metadata) that search engines look for when crawling webpages. Other information, especially in the case of journal articles, can only be accessed through other databases. You learned more about searching these databases in the "Finding Journal Articles" portion of this tutorial.

The short of the story is...if you rely only on a Google search to find information, you could be missing items that would be vital to your research!

The invisible web refers to the items that do not show up in a typical web search engine.

Remember that anyone can publish a page on the web, so it is up to you to determine whether the page is legitimate and factual. For more information on how to do this, see the "Evaluating Information" portion of this tutorial.

Tools