Search Engine Skills Search engines are the only effective means of rapid access to groups of research documents on the Internet. The search engine is the researcher's basic tool. Thus it is necessary to learn these search engines and how to extract the most useful results from each. Each researcher may choose a particular set of search engines that best serve the desired search methodology and the specific requirements of the search. Search methodologies are very personal and there is much variation in strategies available.
Most users prefer the ability to narrow the search with successive or recursive search techniques.
This is where the next level of search uses as input the results of the previous search - with a new search argument. There are many search engines. The author's personal choices are listed below. A description of each engine follows. Google is the most recent of the search engines, and currently in beta test, does not really allow for searching previous results.