Introduction to the Internet for Recreation 222
Instructor: Laura Sederberg.............................................Librarian: Barbara Pease

Things to know before you start searching (Survey shows searchers are confident... and clueless)
When you "search the web" you are NOT searching the web directly - or searching ALL of it.
The web is too large and too distributed and changes too frequently. NO search engine contains everything that is
on the web. When you "search the web" you are really searching whatever portion of the web is captured and indexed by
whatever search engine or directory you are using.

Internet search engines are great for finding practical or popular information. They are not recommended for finding
scholarly or trade/professional articles. For these, you should use one of the Library's databases. To see all databases or just those recommended for Recreation topics use the About Finding Articles link on the Library ReSEARCH Station.

Human vs Machine indexing
Search Engines use computer robots or spiders to collect web pages and index the words on them. Robots don't know what the words mean, they just find the letter combinations. Subject Directories use human beings to scan the pages and assign them to categories. Human beings know what the words mean, thus they can put related items together in the same category - even if they use different words.

• A unique " PageRank™ formula often puts useful pages right at the top. It combines
  • Popularity - based on the number of links to a page and the importance of the pages that link to it
  • Importance - number of "hits" on a page, quality of the links on the page
  • Word proximity and occurrence in results
• Many ways to limit searches and find only the items with most relevance for you.
  • Use Advanced Search to find words only in the title of a web page
    • increases the relevance of the pages you find
  • Use Google Uncle Sam (http://www.google.com/unclesam) to find only U.S. Government Documents
  • Use Advanced Search to find items in pdf. Scholarly / professional items are often in pdf.

Special Google Features I find useful:

From: Googling to the Max, UC Berkeley Teaching Library Internet Workshops, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Google.html

This guide was prepared by Barbara Pease, Librarian for Recreaton & Parks Management, February 2005
It is available online at http://www.csuchico.edu/lref/guides/recr/Rec222_Internet_Intro.htm