Searching Effectively . Browsing among books or journals in the Library can sometimes lead to unexpected but useful information. More often, however, we use the Library catalogue to locate specific books or we use electronic databases to find important research papers. The web encourages browsing by the simplicity with which hyperlinks can be followed from one page to another, but there are a number of tools to make subject searching on the web more effective. Search Engines .
Search engines are what most people think of when they think of web searching tools.
You type in a word or phrase and the search engine displays a list of web pages, presented as hyperlinks so you can jump directly to pages relating to your topic. Search engines work as follows. This information is then used to create an index of web pages which you can search by typing in keywords. When you use a search engine you are not searching the web, you are just searching an index to part of the web. Links to some of the more useful services are in the Searching section of the Academic Gateway .