Online Research

In the previous modules of the course, you have explored a number of existing History/Social Studies resources that provide access to hundreds of sites which can enrich and expand your existing curriculum. However, you may not have found the specific web resources that you were looking for.

This next module of the course will introduce to you some online search tools which will make it possible to locate other web resources for your topic of interest.

We will be exploring, in turn, search engines, web indexes, parallel search engines and web directories. Each of these search tools has different strengths and weaknesses. You will want to use them all to insure that you have found most of the readily available web resources.

Note: We will complete this module in two parts. In the exploration sections, you will explore each of the recommended search tools, becoming familiar with its user interface and the types of resources it offers. In the research section, you will return to each of the search tools to conduct research on the specific History/Social Studies Standard that you selected in Module 2.

We'll begin with an introduction to web search engines.

Next: Search Engine Introduction