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Now, remember the rules. The first person to find enough information to fill three pages wins.

So you look up information on cocker spaniels.

You research the history of surfboards. And I'm looking up Roman fashion.

And we can use any internet website or web page we find, right?

Right.

But the information has to be credible, right?

Exactly. No funny business, accurate information from credible sources. Anymore questions?

OK, go.

It's difficult to imagine life before the internet. Finding even the most basic information often required a trip to the library and sometimes hours of sifting through books and periodicals. Now, all kinds of information is available within a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse.

The downside is that there's so much of it, which is, obviously, also the upside. You have far more choice in what kind of information you can access. You can access information instantaneously and globally. And for students today, there's a lot more information at their fingertips than students of previous generations had. The downside of that is that not all of it's reliable.

It helps to begin by understanding exactly what the internet is. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 signaled a mass revival of scientific and technological research in the US. To protect their research, the military developed a network in the 1960s to send small data packets from computer to computer. And thus, the idea of the internet was born.

The idea was to create a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. If this occurred, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.

At first, the internet was used mainly by computer engineers, scientists, and librarians. And learning how to use it was very complex.

The FTP protocol enabled file transfers between internet sites by 1973. And email was developed as a means of sharing developmental work throughout this relatively small community of users.

Libraries began networking their catalogs in the late 1960s. And while difficult to navigate at first, these catalogs gradually became available to the world.

The internet matured in the '70s and '80s as mainframes around the educational community were connected to provide mail services and email discussion lists called listservs. These developments made it easier for non-technical people to use the internet.

While the number of sites on the internet was small, it was fairly easy to keep track of the resources of interest that were available. But as more and more universities and organizations and their libraries connected, the internet became harder and harder to track. There was more and more need for tools to index the resources that were available.

The internet became public with the release of the world wide web in 1992. And online research became easier two years later when WebCrawler was invented as the first full-text web search engine.

In 1996, the first mobile phone with internet connectivity was released. And by 1999, the wireless technology referred to as Wi-Fi was standardized, launching the wave of portable and handheld devices.

But the internet was designed and set up, even before the internet, the early origins of the way that code was developed in the 1950s, in a subversive way to make information free. It's not embedded in the technology by the nature of technology. It's embedded by the way that the technology was coded and built.

Humans did this. But it was done in a way that has shifted power away from the people who produce information to the people who have developed the software to distribute the information and the people who own the devices or the pipe through which the information is going.

So if you imagine a big search engine like Google, which is what people call a vertical search tool. It's going to return millions of results. And your best results are as likely to be on page 50 or page 500 of that long vertical list as they are to be on that first page or the first or second page, which is really as far as most people get when they're searching. So what you want to do is really increase your odds of finding those best documents by bringing them up to the top of your result list.

There are three types of research, individual facts or data, report or review, and analysis.

By looking at individual facts or data, I can find statistics and other clear-cut information on cocker spaniels.

Reading reports and reviews, I can find facts and data from multiple sources compiled into a summary about my surfboard.

I'm going to delve into this analysis of Roman fashion by checking out an analysis. I can find open-ended research that leads to a new meaning of a topic and can even help me when I have to write a paper from a certain point of view.

Before beginning a search, here are some steps to take. First, analyze the topic. Ask the who, what, where, when, how, and whys of the given topic. Then determine which of the three research methods you will need to use to answer these questions. Will an individual data search suffice? Or will a more in-depth method be necessary?

I think about, what are the questions I want to answer about this topic? That's first. And I think broadly. Because oftentimes when I'm researching a topic, I have an idea in mind of the story I want to write. I have an idea of the questions I think need to be answered. But I also realize that more questions may occur to me as I do the research.

The next step is to brainstorm some ideas. Set aside a few minutes to free write what comes to mind when thinking about the topic. Brainstorming techniques include lists, outlines, or mind mapping where you diagram your thoughts. When you're finished, pick keywords from the results that can be used in your search queries.

The last step is to formulate questions that you want to answer. Construct a research plan based on these questions and focus on the keywords you've chosen from the brainstorming exercise.

So I think there's a process of what I call throwing out the drag net where I just open my mind. And Google, by the way, is great for that. I would say, I start Googling a topic. I start looking for clips. I start looking in sources, if it's a topic that I know where I can find source materials.

One of the biggest challenges to internet research is that there are hundreds of millions of websites. So it's important to understand the differences between them.

There are three common forms of published content, popular, scholarly, trade. Popular sources include entertainment sites, blogs, celebrity news, magazines, and newspapers. These sources are not often used for academic research, as they contain articles on current events for general research.

Scholarly sources are much more credible. They consist of academic journals, research articles, or reviews that are written by experts in a given field. The content is created from extensive research and includes bibliographies. And many scholarly articles undergo rigorous review by other experts before publication.

Trade sources combine popular and scholarly techniques to focus on one specialized topic. Examples include sites dedicated to a specific profession or hobby. They often feature content from experts in the field.

Then, it's also important to realize that the information in these three types of publications come from three different kinds of sources, primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary sources are unaltered first-person narratives and content. Speeches, interviews, letters, diaries, photos, manuscripts, emails, official records, or court documents would be categorized as primary sources.

Secondary sources interpret raw materials and primary sources. Critiques, reviews, magazines, journals, newspapers, books, histories, textbooks, and summaries are all types of secondary sources.

Tertiary sources are lists of compiled secondary sources. These resources include bibliographies, encyclopedias, and indexes. They do not deliver in-depth information but rather a broad overview of a topic.

Then the next step is really to go through those sources of information and find out, who were the primary sources that were quoted or that were interviewed? And if you're doing your own original research, it's incredibly valuable to go back to them and do your own reporting and do your own interviewing. And that will give you a base to work with and then your own original work to build on top of that.

Secondary content on certain sites might not be the most reliable. It really depends on the credibility of each individual site.

Tertiary material can be useful as jumping off points for further research. For example, a bibliography can have links for a primary source interview or a speech that can provide further insight on a subject.

In books and papers, you often reference the bibliography. In Wikipedia, I do the same thing. If I see a fact on Wikipedia that I think is interesting, that I would like to cite, I'm not going to cite it from Wikipedia. I'm going to go to the bottom of the Wikipedia page, see where they sourced that from. And if it's a reliable source, then I'll attribute it to whatever that reliable source was. If it isn't, then I won't.

Being able to identify the different types of sources will help narrow down your search results.

Now is the time to use a set of keywords. Keywords are nouns and objects related to the topic. Unique identifiers like names, titles, numbers, dates, and quotations will yield the best results.

Ancient Roman fashion, hmmm. My keywords to start with should be Roman, clothing, gladiators, togas, or even ancient Rome. I should narrow down a time frame. Let's say 750 BCE to 500 CE.

I've already searched my keywords for cocker spaniel. Now I'm going to try to use the stems and synonyms to refine my search.

I need to find results that are actually credible. I'll try using terms like surfing industry instead of just surfing.

A good starting point for finding scholarly material is to use library databases. These are licensed search engines or online school libraries that evaluate content for credibility and effectiveness before posting it on the site.

Two well known databases are ProQuest and LexisNexis. These two sites, like many others, require membership or login information to view the content. They offer primary and secondary scholarly sources and have options for refined searches. Each result has a combination of full-text, summary, or citations and abstracts of documents and publications.

We go back and look at the original stories that have been done on a topic. And so we use Nexis for that or Factiva. Those are subscription services. But a lot of universities do have subscriptions to those.

For more general queries, search engines are the best place to start. There are three types of search engines that you can use.

Crawler-based engines like Google or Yahoo compile their listings automatically. They crawl through millions of sites on the web and list any that match your search query. Consumers view and sift through the findings to find the one site they want.

Directories are engines in which human editors compile the listings and submit the information about their website. Search results are based on the written descriptions of the site.

Specialty search engines give results from one type of website. For example, Technorati is a special search engine for searching blogs. USA.gov searches only within government websites. Expedia or Kayak search for travel accommodations. PRB.org searches for US population data information. Dogpile.com and Webcrawler.com are metasearch engines that combine results from other engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, or Ask.com.

Sometimes a keyword or synonym is not enough. And it's necessary to use more advanced research tools to get the results you want.

I just about filled my three pages. Are the two of you having trouble?

Well, no, not trouble. But it's tough to narrow down my topic.

Me too. But I'm going to use a new approach, quotations. If I use quotations in my search, I'll get results of pages that have my exact phrase and quotes.

Let's see. Hmm, it narrows my results by half, but still too high of a number.

Here's another tip. Try using Boolean operators.

Boola who?

Boolean operators, it's using the words AND, OR, AND NOT, or NEAR in between your keywords or phrases. Here, watch.

Logical or Boolean operators combine multiple keywords or phrases with the operators AND, OR, AND NOT, or NEAR, always written as all caps. AND requires that both terms or phrases of a search query must be present in the results.

OR allows either term or phrase to be present. This operator yields more results than the AND operator.

AND NOT rejects the second term or phrase from the search results. Depending on the settings of the search engine, the operator can also be written as NOT or with a minus symbol. If you type, surfboard AND NOT wooden, you will get results about surfboards, none of which are wooden.

NEAR is like AND, except it yields results in which both terms are close in proximity to each other on a page. Some advanced search engines allow you to enter numbers to indicate how far apart the two terms can be. NEAR4 would only show results in which the terms are four words apart or closer.

Ah, I think I got it. AND and NOT narrows a search while OR broadens the search.

Yeah, you definitely have it now.

Boolean operators are really helpful for databases. But some search engines like Google already use AND as the default setting while searching. You can type in multiple words. And Google automatically knows to use the AND operator. It's best to check your database before you start your search to know what settings it already uses.

Another way to broaden your search results is with wildcard and truncation symbols. They're useful if you're searching for words with multiple endings, meanings, or spellings, of if you want to search for a variation of a phrase.

Sometimes when your search is not too broad, you might want to use an asterisk. An asterisk is important because it picks up alternate forms of a word. It might pick up plurals.

So using the asterisk right next to the last letter in a word that's not awfully common-- so say you're looking for adolescents and drug use. The word adolescents might be the word that is used specifically. But they might use adolescent. Or they might use the "ce." Or they use the "ts." So putting that asterisk in a critical spot, right after the end perhaps, is really the way to go.

When the tilde key is used as a prefix, the search engine is directed to look for synonyms of the keyword. Tilda soldier would show results with guard, trooper, infantry, veteran, or warrior.

In the early days of searching, we'd use a search syntax involving parentheses and other tools and create a long search sentence that was confusing to the average researcher. I don't do that so much anymore, although I might in a very, very sophisticated tool or a tool that didn't have a lot of helps.

For example, book AND fiction OR biography will list sites about fiction books and sites about all types of biographies, which can be TV specials, reference biographies, or a website bio. Book AND parentheses fiction OR biography, within parentheses like this, means you are looking for a book that is either a fiction or biography. Book AND parentheses fiction or biography AND Jack Kerouac means you are looking for a fiction or biography book by or about author Jack Kerouac.

I think one of the reasons that it's not necessary for searchers to learn this long and complicated syntax of search anymore is because so many of the tools are already in the advanced search screen of your database or your search engine. For instance, just clicking on Advanced Search, it's right under the search box in Google, pops up an array of tools that will allow you to do a far better search.

Field searches are useful if you want to search a specific area of a website. There are options to search the title, URL, author, abstract, citation, or full text of a document or site.

Most often the reason that you're not doing a good search is because you don't yet have that background knowledge or context for searching in that field. And please don't forget that humans are important tools as well. Your librarian on your campus or even the one that's up day and night through an email, IM, or toolbar service is likely going to guide you in the right direction and suggest tools that you never thought of. There's probably a list of suggested search engines that you can use beyond the one that you're always using over and over again.

Once you choose which website to review, you still have work to do before you start taking notes or compiling a report. Before you go too far, you want to assess the credibility of the website as a whole.

People think that somehow having something available online gives it some sort of legitimacy, which, of course, the truth is just the opposite. So we start with that and look, basically, at the source. Is it an obvious, trusted, credible source? Is it a professional news organization? Is it a firsthand account from someone that you know? And then as you get more and more distant from those sorts of automatically reliable sources, you have to apply increasingly stringent levels of scrutiny to it.

For starters, I take the government as a reliable source of information. So if I'm obtaining information from a government website, then I consider it the official information of the United States government.

Now, whether the government has sort of doctored its facts and figures, that's another story. But at the very least, I can attribute this information. And I consider it an accurate reflection of what the government thinks.

Some information, some ideas, are let's say manufactured in a way where there's not as much credibility around them as there is for other kinds of sources of information. And you have to learn to appreciate the difference between that which is truly factual and that which is perhaps slanted, more opinion. And how to judge the difference between those two is really important.

Here are some factors to consider. Is the site published by a reputable source? Is the author a recognized expert on the subject? Does the author have contact information or a list of his credentials? Is the site updated and current? Is the information relevant and accurate? Does the site look professional? Is the content grammatically correct and free of spelling errors? Is there a bibliography or list of references?

If you answered, no, to multiple questions, chances are the site is not credible and should not be used as a source in your research.

Choosing the right search method for what you're looking for can be difficult at first. But testing out the techniques and working with the search engine's settings will allow you to find information, sources, and content that will help you explore new ideas and find valuable information on your topic.

It's important, especially for research in hot topics and current events, that you really understand dynamic content. When you find that perfect blog or that perfect writer or a perfect section of a major newspaper, establish that RSS feed. Grab that RSS feed. Get that little orange button with the wave. And put it in your reader, wherever you store web content.

And what will happen is every time that's updated, it could be a YouTube channel, every time that channel is updated, it will be pushed to you either through your reader, your RSS reader, feed reader. Or you could have it sent to you as an email alert.

One of our journalists tells our students that, in a digital world, everybody needs to learn to think like a journalist. And I think that faced with such a wide variety of sources of information of such widely varying credibility and accountability and professionalism, that it really is incumbent upon individuals to learn how to ask questions about what to believe to sort the credible from the incredible.