Searching the Internet for specific information is time-consuming for anyone, but secondary students are faced with a with the added difficulty of a limited amount of time, the length of a class period,  in which to obtain results. An Internet search often brings millions of hits. The student examines the first ten hits and then the next ten, which often are no better than the first. Before you know it, the period is over and the student has no results.

A lot of this Internet frustration can be prevented in two ways.  Teachers can have some Internet sites on the topic preselected and linked to the assignment on the school's home page. Secondly, students to be taught effective Internet searching skills.

There are a few tips that I give to students to help them streamline their search results so they have some good results saved at the end of the period.
 

• Use AltaVista Advanced search.  Regardless of whatever search engine, students are used to using, they are asked to forget it  and use AltaVista Advanced for this class period.
• Search in the title field, for example:
                      title:WebQuest*
• Use wildcards to save typing time or searching twice, for example:
                      genetic* is the same as as genetic, genetics, genetically
• Search as a phrase. Use " " around two or more words to indicate that those words are to searched as a phrase.

Use the "sort by" feature in AltaVista Advanced.  AltaVista Advanced is the only search engine that allows the searcher to determine which results come to the top of the search results or to control the ranking of the search results.  This is a very powerful search feature. Take a look at these example:
                    title:cookie*
                    sort by:"chocolate chip"

                    title:"New York"
                    sort by: poverty

• Understand Boolean oerators AND, OR, AND NOT and in AltaVista the operator NEAR and know how to use them effectively.
• One of the most effective Boolean searches for students to add to any search they are performing is AND NOT.com. This will eliminate most of the commercial sites.
• The operator NEAR is a very useful operator. Pierre NEAR Trudeau finds "Pierre Trudeau" and "Pierre Elliott Trudeau".

There are times when I have students use other search engines, such as Google and Fast Search,  and even times when I direct them to meta-search engines. However, they generally achieve very good results with these search tips in AltaVista Advanced. Many students tend to overuse meta-search engines, and when they need to find a particular aspect of a topic, which is generally what they are searching for most of the time, the meta-search engines, let them down.