Choosing the Right Tool

Now that we know a little more about directories and search engines, let's talk about when to use them.

Directories

We learned that directories are select lists of Internet sites arranged in an organized manner. It makes sense, then, that these tools would be useful when you want:

Overview
Directories are helpful when you are searching in an unfamiliar subject area and want to know the kinds of Internet sites available. They give you the "big picture" of the types of resources you can find on the Internet.

Selectivity
Choose a directory when you are looking for a few good, relevant sites rather than "everything" on the Internet that happens to mention a certain keyword

Context Specific
You can often limit your search in a directory to resources in a certain area, such as medicine. For example, let's say you want information on the AIDS disease. By limiting your search to medicine, you don't have to sort through items in a different area, such as teaching "aids" in education or political "aids" in government.

Directories are often a good place to start your search simply because they filter out many of the irrelevant sites on a topic.

Search Engines

Since search engines, unlike directories, are done at random by computer and do not have any pre-existing organization, why would you want to use them? These tools are good choices when you want:

Full-text Searching
Most search engines index every word of an Internet document. This is helpful when you are searching for a unique or obscure expression and didn't find what you wanted in a directory.

Currency
Search engines are often more "up-to-date". It may take longer for a site to get listed in a directory.

Comprehensiveness
No, not everything on the Internet shows up in these search engines. They do provide, however, a large group of sites on your topic.

Search engines can often find specific pieces of information that are filtered out of directories. These two types of tools complement each other.

Examples From Everyday Life

You may not have thought about it before, but we use similar types of tools almost everyday. For example:

• In a food store, you may use a store directory to find the canned vegetable section. If you want to know if a certain brand of product is carried, the store may need to do a specific search in its computerized inventory program.
• In a medical office building, the directory on the wall may list the doctors' offices, but you would need to consult a more specific list to find the name of an individual staff member in a particular office.
• In a bookstore, you can browse the sections set up by the store staff (e.g. fiction, science fiction, business) or you may need to have the staff look up a specific title in its inventory database.

Both search engines and directories are essential in doing any search of the Internet.

So Are Search Engines and Directories All I Need For Internet Research?

Not exactly. There are many sources of information available over the Internet that don't get listed in search engines and directories. For research purposes, the most important of these may be the journal indexes and full-text journal collections that many libraries offer. On the next page, we'll look at how these tools compare to the ones we have been studying.