Searching The Internet

There are a mind boggling number of sites on the web and there's simply no way to list all of the great resources you can find, so we decided to provide a brief list of our favorites in several general reference categories that we believe will help you succeed in your college classes:

Searching on the internet

A short and easy search engine tutorial- A short and easy guide to web searching, search engines and directories. This little crash course will teach you how to explore the Net more efficiently, and it includes an introduction to advanced Boolean searching.

Google
Our favorite search engine. Unfortunately some of the other search engines that  were really useful once now require sites to pay for their inclusion into the search engine by bidding for "keywords". The more the web site owner pay for the keyword term the more often their site will come up first in the search results. Obviously those type of results are financially desirable for the search engine but not very useful to the person conducting a web search. What you want to find as a result of your search are unbiased and relevant results - not results based mostly upon who pays the most. Therefore we recommend Google.

Searching Google is easy. Simply enter a word or a statement into the search box below and give it a try. The search results will open in a new window so you won't lose this page. Try several searches, such as "Nursing Home Abuse", then try something like "How to fix a leaking faucet"...

Web address: Google Web Search

Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Search by author, title, date, for papers in specific publications, or by category. For help with Google Scholar search and to learn how to use advanced search features go here.

Web Address: Google Scholar Web Search

Links to additional search tools by type: