Searching: Overview

What are the most effective search strategies and tools?

There are two important methods of finding resources on the Internet: browsing and searching. These terms are also listed in the glossary. You are likely to use a combination of methods when looking for an Internet resource.

Browsing: When you click on an image or hyperlinked text and follow a link from one Web page to another, this is referred to as browsing. A link may be followed to a different page within the same resource, to a different resource, or to an entirely separate Web site, perhaps on the other side of the world.

Step by step, you can use links to look through the Internet. Frequently, you may finish a session on the Internet using a different resource, on a different Web site from where you started.

Browsing is a good method of seeing what kinds of resources are available in health promotion and community health. Any resource, especially organizations websites, may contain a list of links to other resources and Web sites covering the same subject. These lists can provide a useful starting point for browsing.

Searching: Many Web sites display a search box and invite you to enter keywords and click a button labelled "search" or "find". What happens next differs from site to site, but frequently a set of links is retrieved for you to explore.

Search features like this can be set up to search a single resource, a Web site, or several Web sites. The links may point to Web pages within the same resource, or anywhere on the Internet, depending on the nature of the search tool.

It is always important to be sure what the search box is for, prior to using it. (There may be instructions on the page nearby, if not check for "Help"). For example, the search box on the Health Canada website at
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/english/search.html searches the Health Canada, and some other federal government web sites only, not the wider Internet.