General advices on how to find information online

How search engines work

Without preparation, the student who searches information on the Internet, will probably get lost in the superabundance of information of the Web. The first reflex is use a search engine website like Altavista or Google then to type one or more key words in the type box and to validate in order to launch the request. Search engine websites as Yahoo!, Altavista or Google base the results of their requests on three operations:

- the robots, which continuously browse the web;
- the indexers, who analyze and classify the listed pages;
- the counters, who answer the requests according to criteria of relevance.

The limits of the search engine and meta-engine websites

A list of websites with short descriptions is posted in response of each request of the user. The first posted websites are those which best fit the criteria of the research. In practice, the search engines are not enough intelligent to find exactly the relevant information, even though the quality of the answers also depends on how the requests are expressed. One will prefer the meta-engines, such as Copernic, Ariane, Debriefing.com, Ixquick or Metacrawler which use the results of tens of engines. Kartoo is most original, with a chart for the found answers.

The most effective step is to start the research in specialized websites or in the directories websites. In general, they have an internal search engine which provides more precise results than the search engine websites such as Altavista or Google.