Lesson 4: Using Specialized Search Tools
Ready to pave your way to an even higher degree of Internet search success? This lesson takes you into some of the nooks and crannies of the Internet, introducing you to a slew of highly specialized tools that will help you find just what you are looking for.
Lesson 4 Overview
Objectives
In this lesson you will learn about:
- Tools and techniques for finding contact information for people and businesses
- Sources and tips for finding multimedia
- Reference tools resources
Nooks and Crannies
In the introduction to The Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook, author Randolph Hock recalls the Thomas’s English Muffin television ads that claimed that is was their “nooks and crannies” that made them tasty. Hock writes:
“The same may be true of the Internet. It is in the Internet’s nooks and crannies that the true ‘tastiness’ often lies. Almost every Internet user has used Google and probably Yahoo!, and any group of experienced researchers could probably come up with a dozen or so sites that every one of them had used. But for experienced searchers, time and task constraints have meant that some nooks and crannies have not been explored.”
This lesson helps you uncover and take delight in some of the Internet’s most useful nooks and crannies. You will discover tools that will help you find contact information for people and businesses, tools for finding multimedia such as music, video, or graphics (photographs, clipart, etc.), and you will encounter some very useful reference tools that will make you wonder how you ever got along without them.
Building Your Web Reference Library
Throughout this course you’ve been introduced to a wide variety of highly useful tools, and this lesson will be no exception. Consider these tools part of your web reference library.
Like any library, you will want to keep your web reference library organized so you can quickly and easily access the tools you want to use. Before this course ends, be sure to bookmark all of you favorite tools. It might also help to create folders within your Favorites list to further organize your library. An example of how you might organize this is shown below:
In the above example, a folder titled “My Web Library” was created first. The additional folders were then created and placed inside of the My Web Library folder. (In MS Explorer you would use the Favorites > Organize Favorites command to accomplish this. In Netscape you would use the Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks command to accomplish this. And for you Macintosh folks, In Safari you would use the Bookmarks > Add Bookmarks Folder command to accomplish this.)
After you create the folder structure you can then visit each of the resources in this course and add them to the appropriate folder. Voila! Instant web library!
Supplemental Reading
For each of the sections in this lesson (as well as all of the other lessons in this course), you will be required to do some supplemental reading in The Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook, by Randolph Hock (CyberAge Books). The reading pages have been carefully chosen to compliment the online lesson materials.
If you have any questions about the supplemental reading or the posted lesson text, post a message on the classroom message board. Likewise, if you have comments or feedback about the supplemental reading, or resources that you would like to share with your classmates, be sure to post a message on the classroom message board.
