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Native American Research Tutorial

Searching the Internet

Introduction

Bare Bones Tutorial
http://www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/agree.html

This tutorial will guide you through some strategies for searching for Native American materials.

You can use many of the same skills learned in searching the library catalog and electronic databases for searching the Internet.

Some things to keep in mind:

• The Internet includes millions of pages. If you do a very general search (such as "Native American") you will get far too many hits.

• Search engines all operate differently. If you enter two terms (such as "tribal sovereignty"), some will place the Boolean operator AND and some will place the operator OR between your terms.  This will change the results dramatically.  The first will decrease your retrieval set, because both terms must appear. The OR will increase your retrieval set because either term can be in the document.

• Search engines also index different pages. No single search engines searches the entire World Wide Web. They all use different methods for calculating relevancy, or how to order the list of results. For a comprehensive search, use more than one search engine or a metasearch engine, which searches across more than one search engine at a time.

• Internet sources vary considerably in terms of quality. Some provide up-to-date and accurate information, while others do not. This is especially true of Native American content. There are a lot of non-Indian "hobbyists" interested in native cultures. Some of these individuals produce high-quality and sensitive sights, but many do not. Thus, evaluating your results is very important.

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