How to search

1. Let's do a search for Women's Resources

The first thing to ask yourself is this: "How would I get this information in the real world?" Perhaps you would consult library. So let's start with that premise, using the Yahoo! Directory Search
[Click on this link to open Yahoo! in a new browser window. As you are following our instructions you can switch between this window and that by using the Open Programs Bar located at the bottom of your desktop.]

In the search box, enter women's resources library.
When searching it is best to be as specific as possible to narrow the scope of the search. Just entering 'Women' will result in hundreds and thousands of results, also referred to as hits. By adding the additional word 'library', there's only a few.
I got 9 clear results from this search. They are in categories.

The search returns 9 categories, one of which is Journals, that looks very promising.
Lets click on this category.

You should get a list of about 20 related web sites, along with a brief description of each.
Now you have to visit each site to see if there's any information about women's resources.

Try doing a search by entering just the word 'women'.
Yahoo! returns a list of categories with about 612 related.
So much for directories!

Close the Yahoo! window.

2. Let's try using AltaVista, an index search engine.

Once again, click the link to open a new browser window with the AltaVista site in it.

Enter women's resource center in the search box.
The AltaVista search results in thousands of documents that match the search terms! Life is too short to comb through all these. The reason for this enormous list is that AltaVista turns up every document that contains the words 'women's', 'centers' AND 'resources' and all combinations of the words.

To search for documents that contain these three words together, you must use quotation marks around the terms.

Try Typing "womens resource centers" this time. The result is only 76 documents to be looked at on the web.