| Finding information | Specialized searches |
• Search engines, databases and ordinary websites are not created equal. On this page and other pages of my website, carefully read the descriptions. Do the same on any other website.
• Teach yourself basic skills for effective research by working your way through the online tutorial LILO ("Learning Information Literacy Online"). This was designed by the University of Hawai‘i Libraries Information Literacy Committee.
• With whatever search engine you happen to be using, record your search terms. Write down the words or phrases you typed into the online search field. Until you find what you need, continuously monitor all details of your search. Successively modify your search strategy, noticing which combinations are — and are not — productive until you are successful.
• Free commercial search engines do not always disclose financial deals that favor their advertisers' databases. Protect yourself against excessively narrow search results by using more than one search engine.
• The Metacrawler Advanced Search lets you search by "any" or "all" of words in your search field or even to search them as a "phrase." Of these three, the "any" search is the broadest. And the "phrase" search is the narrowest.
• A Metacrawler Advanced Search also does the following:
1. Allows Boolean searches — linking your search terms with conjunctions "and," "or" or "and/not."
2. Allows searches in eleven languages.
• Read and complete the self-guided Basics of Google Search orientation.
• Next, search a phrase and combine other search elements by using the Google Advanced Search. It lets the user make four important choices:
1. Search a phrase combined with other search elements.
2. Direct the search engine to the element of a Web document that you wish to search — its title, URL, text, hyperlinks, or all of these.
3. Select time periods for results during the past three months, six months, one year or anytime.
4. Specify any of 30 specific languages. Otherwise, the default is "any language."
• As a back-up, Ask Jeeves, or Find Articles.
• Search the H-Net Online database of vetted discussions and announcements in the humanities and social sciences.
• Instead of exposing yourself to embarrassment with unreliable and irresponsibly vetted Wikipedia articles, use the peer-reviewed Scholarpedia. Eugene M. Izhikevich is the editor.
• A customized WebCrawler search pulls results from several different popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves About, LookSmart, Overture Teoma, and FindWhat.
• WebCrawler's Advanced Search is helpfully selective. With less precision, WebCrawler also searches digital images.
• Use the Phrase Finder to track down the origins of hard-to-find catchy expressions used by politicians, writers and activists in social movements.
• And try Scirus to search citations to specific authors of articles.
• Begin at Hamilton Library's political science homepage.
• Information and analysis on the open Internet are often inferior to what you can find more easily in Hawai‘i Voyager. In Hawai‘i Voyager's Basic Search or Guided Search, utilize powerful "Subject Heading" searches. These link the user to every book, journal or video classified under the same Subject Heading(s). Once you have located an online record for any library item that you know is relevant, click on its Subject Heading(s).
• Use Hawai‘i Voyager's Internet Reference and Subject Resources to get citations, abstracts and full texts of articles.
• Yahoo! Political Science deserves your attention.
• If you need to know more about an important event and if you know when it occurred, you might consult This Day in History (a project of A&# Television Networks). To do this, select one of fifteen categories (for example, "Cold War") and enter the date (month and day only).
• High-quality content on a broad range of topics is searchable on the WWW Virtual Library. For example, the Hawai‘i politics and Chinese cultures abroad projects on Vincent Pollard's website are officially part of the WWW Virtual Library.
• The Google Advanced Scholar Search lets users fine-tune desired time periods for citations of authors.
• To search images, visit Metacrawler.
• Or try Yahoo! Advanced Image Search and Flicker worldwide photo sharing.
© 1999-2009, Vincent K. Pollard.
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