Expert Searching

A Guide to Developing Your Search Skills

This is a set of guides and tips to searching on the Internet. Taken together, they provide enough information to become a skilled searcher. If you are new to searching, use the Search Engine Guide as your starting point, and come back to the other features listed here as you develop your skills. If you are an experienced searcher, look through all of these features for tips you can use.

1. Search Engine Guide. Links and how-to-do-it instructions for the major search engines and directories. This file is updated regularly.
2. Find-It! A Guide to Specialized Searches. There are many search engines devoted to particular types of data, and this is a guide to finding those.
3. Searching the Invisible Web. How to find information that the search engines cannot reach.
4. Search Tip: Find Expert Help. If you can't find the information, locate an expert source to help you.
5. Search Tip: Boolean Searching. Learn to use the full power of Boolean searching to narrow your searches.
6. What to do with 50 Million Hits! How to refine those searches that produce too many results.
7. Finding Broken Links. Broken links are everywhere, even in search engine results. Learn how to track down updated addresses on the nets.