However if we look a little deeper, we often see a false, distorted, repetition, misunderstandings information. “As things stand the Internet has no standard system of quality control so it's important to be careful about which information we use and not to trust everything we read” (Place, E., Kendall, 2006) Also the Internet links millions of computers, and anyone (an amateur or an expert) can put something (true or false information) on the Internet and leave it there as long as they like, even if it goes out of date or change it without warning , perhaps even remove it completely. And so we have a rick that the information we find on the Internet will be from a source that is unreliable, lacking in authority or credibility and will have content that is invalid, inaccurate, out-of-date” (Place, E., Kendall, (2006). Also there are many Internet hoaxes, urban legends, scams and hate sites. Therefore if we want to use internet properly we need to be sceptical and use our critical thinking skills and develop some advanced Internet research skills.
Today we can use a lot of search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Alta Vista to find information on the Internet. However principle of work of different search engines is similar. According to the Wikipedia (2012), a search engine operates in the following order:
1. Web crawling
2. Indexing
3. Searching “Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the HTML itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link on the site.The contents of each page are then analysed to determine how it should be indexed.Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. A query can be a single word. The purpose of an index is to allow information to be found as quickly as possible.” (Wikipedia, 2012)
Dr. Grossan (1997) tried to identify which searching engine is the best. In the first test, he tried a search with "background noise", a topic where a lot of closely related but unwanted information exists. In the second test, Dr. Bruce tried a search for something very obscure. Finally, he tried a search for keywords which overlapped with a very popular search keyword. Dr. Bruce defined a search as successful only if the desired or relevant sites were returned on the first page of results. The winner of the tests has become search engine Lycos. However in the same time Dr. Grossan (1997) mentioned that trying to identify the best searching engine is “missing the point”. We should use different engines for different tasks (Dr. Grossan, 1997).
Which search page should weuse when, and how. (Dr. Grossan 1997) Use . . . | If You . . . | Using the Feature . . . | Lycos | have no good ideas for specific search strategies | best test results for broad search terms | | want to find someone's e-mail | People Finder. | Magellan | have more than one broad search word, or can't pick a site from Lycos' summaries. | best available results summaries. | | want interactive news/ want details on today's headlines. | news with links to related sites. | Open Text | want to search only document title or perform complex searches | title search specification,