Decide if your topic will be addressed on the Internet. Topics that deal with humanities and social sciences are not likely to be covered with much depth. Decide what type of search engine you are going to use to retrieve your needed information. A search engine is a huge database that tracks information from web sites. Search engines are broken down into two categories, directories and indexes.
Directories Identify general information.
Directories list Web sites related to your desired topic. An example of a directory is Yahoo. Indexes Find individual pages of a Web site Indexes list Web sites in order of relevancy, the number of times the search terms you used appear in a document, or how closely the document appears to match a concept you have entered. An example of an index is Lycos. Evaluate the results that are produced from the search engine.