updated: 18 April 2006

Best Uses for Search Tools

General Search Engines

Particularly effective when searching for:

• a specific person, place, or thing.  For example: General Electric or Roy Thomson Hall.
• the "needle in the haystack"

Not recommended if you are seeking:

• a general overview of a research topic
• clarification of a topic or term

Subject Directories

Particularly effective when searching for:

• an overview of a topic
• an introduction to a topic

Effective place to start looking for information. Subject Directories will often point you to portals or gateways that link to high-quality information.
 

Invisible Web Search Engines

Effective for tracking down:

• facts
• data
• statistics
• maps

The Libraries' subscription-based indexes and databases are part of the invisible Web; these provide the best access to

• scholarly journal articles
• newspaper and magazine articles
• statistical data
   

Meta-Search Engines

Not recommended for initial searching. Not sophisticated in how they send searches to general search engines and often rely upon poorer general search engines that index a very small portion of the WWW.

Question: You are beginning to do some research for an essay and want to focus on some issue pertaining to aboriginal history in Canada.  At this point, you don't have a very clear idea of good issues or themes to examine.

What type of search tool would likely retrieve some quality introductory information on this topic?

•  A General Search Engine such as Google.
   
•  A Subject Directory such as Canadian Information by Subject.
   
•  An Invisible Web Search Engine such as Invisible Web Directory.
   
•  A Meta-Search Engine such as Dogpile.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.  York University Libraries & Foundations Computer Assistance Program, York University, Toronto, ON Canada M3J 1P3.

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