Internet

What is a search engine?

A search engine is a program that looks at a wide range of online documents for certain specified keywords and generates a list of documents that contain the specified keywords.

Search engines work by sending out a program called a spider to fetch as many online documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document.

What are some good search engines?

Search engines come in many different forms; subject specific, meta search, or web site only and everyone has their favorites. Some of our favorite search engines are Google, Ask, Yahoo! Search Clusty and Scandoo. If you need help finding material on the internet contact our library staff for assistance.

How to evaluate web sites?

The internet can be a good source of information of news, up to date statistics, and regulations. When looking at a website items to notice include: the author, updated date and url extension (gov, net, com, etc.) For additional information see the document above

What are some good sources for images?

The library subscribes to ArtStor, a database which includes about 1 million museum quality images that can be used in class presentations and research pages. ArtStor is available from the Electronic Resources Page, clickable from the Library Home Page. In addition, Microsoft has compiled a digital image library which can be quite useful. The image library includes photographs, clipart, animations and sounds. Images found here are not copyright protected. Google images is another good source of images. Images from Google may be subject to copyright. For information on how to cite copyrighted images in MLA form see this article from Noodlebib website.

Last Updated: Feb. 2009