With billions of web sights out there, and more being uploaded everyday, how are you ever going to find what you need? The most effective way to search the web is through the use of search engines and web guides. Search engines offer the user general search capabilities, while web guides offer searches of categories and groupings of web sites.

         Okay, so now that you know where to conduct your search, the question becomes, HOW do you search the web? Search engines and web guides work through the selection of key words. An important key to effectively searching the web becomes finding the right key words. For example, a search of key words Education Research on the search engine Alta Vista (http://altavista.digital.com) produces 59,203,630 hits. WOW 59 million sites! Why so many sites? Because the search collected all web sites that had EITHER education or research as a key word.

         Let’s try again. This time, the key word is "Education Research". By placing quotes around the entire phrase you are searching for, your search will only produce hits that contain the word education followed by the word research. This time, 65,881 sites were hit (a hit is a match of key words).

         Alta Vista, as well as some other search engines, offers an option to "refine" the search. Refine allows you to search within the results of your first search and select only the areas you are interested in. By refining the search to more specifically meet your needs, you will limit the number of hits. In general, the best way to search the web is by refining your search via a search engine until you are able to obtain a reasonable number of sites to explore. GOOD LUCK!