Searching for Educational
Resources

Meta Searches

www.dogpile.com
Who could forget a name like this?
Dogpile is one of the most useful search facilities on the Internet.
It searches eight or nine different search engines, and presents the results from each of them in order.

www.mamma.com
Mamma searches even more engines than Dogpile, but presents a shorter list of results.

www.askjeeves.com
AskJeeves allows searches to be made as questions in real English.
However, the results don't tend to be as good as those from a search done using the notes below.

Directories

www.yahooligans.com
Yahooligans provides results from sites which are easy to read and of general interest to young people.
It divides search findings under headings.
You may have to go through half-a-dozen menus to reach the pages you are looking for.

www.yahoo.com
Yahoo divides search findings under specific headings.
It is not easy for beginners to use, as the sites which they want are unlikely to be at the top of the list.

Search Engines

		www.altavista.com AltaVista has a powerful search facility for pictures, movies and sounds.
		www.lycos.co.uk Lycos is a United Kingdom search engine. Easily identified by the co.uk extension. It offers an option of just searching UK sites or the rest of the web. This is useful if you are finding out what people are doing in National Curriculum numeracy or literacy, or GCSE geography! Lycos also has an image search facility.
		www.ukplus.co.uk UkPlus is another UK search engine.
		www.excite.co.uk UkPlus is another UK search engine.
		http://infoseek.go.com/ Infoseek is a very powerful search engine. The best matches to your search are listed first.
		www.stpt.com My Starting Point is another very powerful search engine. The best matches to your search are listed first.
		www.calvin.edu/library/as/ AlphaSearch accesses "portal" or "gateway" sites. Type in a search word into the box on the right of the page - it works best with general subject name searches such as "mathematics" If you find nothing on the first search, try again with a different search word - it is well worth trying a number of times, because a successful result here could save you hours of searching.

Successful Searching in Three Minutes,
Instead of Three Hours

The key to efficient searching is to use the most suitable search engine for the task, and to use the best words to search for the information that you want.

Using the + sign

Many searches are performed using just a single word, but this can often lead to so many results, that it would be impossible for someone to follow them all up - certainly not in three minutes! More specific searches require more words on the search line. Beginners can be surprised to find that putting in another word results in even more results - all the pages where each word has been found. To get the search engine to find both words on the same page, the + sign is used.

e.g.

If you wanted to know about Tudor history, you would type:

+Tudor +history

Using speech marks

If you want both words to occur together, speech marks are used.

e.g.

If you wanted to know about Mary Queen of Scots, you would type:

"Mary Queen of Scots"

Michael's Links Trick

Michael's Links Trick will enable you to find collections of web links on any subject you care to look for. It is based on the principle that if you are looking for information, it is likely is that someone else has done the same search before, and has published their search findings on the web. Michael's Links Trick helps you to find those results quickly.

e.g.

If you wanted lists of links to Mary Queen of Scots, you would type:

"Mary Queen of Scots" +links

Searching for Titles

All web pages have a title - it appears on the blue bar at the top of the browser. The title of this page is 'Searching for Educational Resources'. Titles are very specific, and you could predict what key words would be in the titles of pages that you are looking for.

e.g.

If you wanted pages that had Tudor history in the title, you would type:

title:+Tudor +history

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