For purposes of this class, a single page has been created to allow you ready access to some of the more well known Web search engines. (Look on your Table of Contents for "Online Tools.")

No matter which type of search engine you use, your goal is to find the most relevant "hits," or Web sites containing information related to your Tentative Thesis Statement. For this reason, you will want to focus your search by combining search terms from your synonym list. Caution: different search engines use different methods of how to conduct a search. Look for guidelines on how to conduct searches within each search engine. For instance, AltaVista provides a "Search Cheat Sheet" offering invaluable advice on how to combine search terms. In AltaVista, a search for mona lisa would locate Web pages containing both mona and lisa, including capitalized variants (Mona, MONA, liSA, Lisa). A search for +mona +lisa would locate Web pages containing both mona and lisa. A search for "mona lisa" would locate only Web sites containing the two words found next to each other.

Josephine learned quickly that she needed to narrow her search when she went searching in AltaVista for Web sites related to her Tentative Thesis Statement: "Loved ones of gang members should not tolerate gang violence in their communities unless they are physically threatened by violence." First, she conducted a general search for "gangs." She found 235,618 possibly relevant Web sites! If she had spent just one minute reviewing each Web site, it would have taken Josephine 3,927 hours--or roughly 163 days!--to determine whether the sites were useful. So Josephine decided to combined several search terms from her synonym list: +families +gangs +tolerance +violence +communities +threatened. She located 445 possibly relevant Web sites, which still would have required 7 hours to review. Fortunately, after just a few minutes of skimming the titles of each Web site, Josephine was able to determine that a dozen or so Web sites were useful.