DOCID: 4046925
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Types of Searches and the Best Ways to Handle Them
The first thing to ask yourself is the one question a lot of people never consider: is the Internet the best place to start? In general, the Internet has become so good at answering factual questions—the kinds of things you find in an almanac, an encyclopedia, or a phone book—that it is now usually better in terms of speed, timeliness, and accuracy than other resources. For example, if I need to know the world's largest hydroelectric plants, I can open an almanac and look up this information or I can type [world's largest hydroelectric plants] into Google, Yahoo, or Live Search, where the first result links me to a page at Information Please.com that contains the answer to the question.
Still, compared to traditional library-type resources, the Internet may be:
- slower (though this is changing with new technologies).
- less reliable (large amounts of bad data in among the good).
- disorganized (a library with all the books on the floor).
- frustrating (lots of "broken" links).
- hard to use (generally poor search tools and too much data to sift through).
- risky because of growing privacy and security threats.
This being said, why do we need to use to the Internet? Because:
- it has almost unlimited amount of data (also a minus… too much of a good thing and way too much of the bad).
- the data tend to be current.
- it offers multimedia (video, audio, charts, tables, illustrations).
- it allows the individual to do much more of his own research.
- it is relatively inexpensive (at least in some countries).
- most importantly, it contains a vast amount of unique information.
