Page 13: The web

Although some of the technologies used in today's most popular part of the Internet, the Word Wide Web, have been around for half a century, the WWW came into existence only in 1990. For a brief history of the WWW see the W3C site, or the site of the Internet Society.

The WWW contains a vast amount of information, but has no in-built structure or organisation. Neither is it access-controlled, so anybody can publish to the web, and there is no central catalogue of the existing content. Furthermore content changes rapidly - millions of pages appear every week, and just as many are taken down. It is, therefore, crucial to have good means of retrieving information on the web, and to thoroughly and carefully evaluate the information found.

Choosing the most suitable search engine

The Library's annotated selection of search engines and other lists, such as Phil Bradley's search engines, can only give you some basic details of the search engines. If you would like more information on how individual search engines work, and how to pick the most appropriate one for a particular task, have a look at Searchenginewatch, or subscribe to their newsletter.

Become an expert web searcher!

A vast and unstructured resource such as the web can become an enormous timewaster if you do not know your way through it. Do not be too impressed by the enormous number of hits search engines tend to return as often enough not a single one of them leads to any resource that is relevant for your research, and of a quality which your course tutor or, later, your boss would accept. A good way to become a more proficient web searcher is by using an on-line tutorial. The following free interactive online tutorials are strongly recommended:

The Tonic Detective is being revamped and will be available again shortly. It is an excellent starting point and will give you a good overall insight into the functioning of the web, and efficient strategies for information retrieval.

The Tonic course is more detailed than Tonic Detective, and takes you to an advanced level.

There is also a wide range of subject specific tutorials available online from RDN's Virtual Training Suite.

All these tutorials allow you to go at your own pace, skip chapters or do them again, and come with exercises at the end of each section. Why not have a go?

Link to this page: http://www.richmond.ac.uk/s/986.aspx