• Basic Issues
• Getting lost in hyperspace -- too many links
• Too much detail
• Knowing what to believe
• Constant change
• Finding what you want/need
• Framing the question
• Questions of fact -- what is the current price of a stock?
• Questions of opinion -- what is the current thinking on dealing with terrorism?
• Questions of framing questions -- data mining
• Finding potential answers
• Hard data in databases
• Documents with relevant indexing keywords
• Documents with relevant text
• Presorted indices and trees of indices
• Search engines
• Meta-search engines
• see http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/ToolsTables.html for types of search tools
•  Organizing the answers
• Sorting by time
• Sorting by relevance
• Boolean operations (OR, AND, NOT)


See


http://netforbeginners.about.com/msubsearch.htm
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html

Prepared by Herbert J. Bernstein yaya@cs.sunysb.edu, 26 November 2001.