Twenty years ago, the first stop on any research mission would have been the library. Today, the Internet puts a massive amount of information at your fingertips. In fact, nearly half of all college students are using their smartphones and tablets to do research for their class assignments (Parker, Lenhart, & Moore, 2012). Navigating the vast sea of information—not to mention misinformation—available on the Internet can be daunting and, without wise searching, a waste of time. A solid knowledge of search tools can therefore make your searches more fruitful and efficient.

An Internet search engine is a program that indexes Web content. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search all over the Web for documents containing specific keywords that you’ve chosen. Search engines have some key advantages—they offer access to a huge portion of publicly available Web pages and give you the ability to search through large databases. But they frequently return irrelevant links, and they don’t index the “invisible Web”—databases maintained by universities, businesses, the government, or libraries that cannot always be accessed by standard search engines. If a search engine fails to produce useful results, try a metasearch engine—a search engine that scans multiple search engines simultaneously. Metasearch technology delivers more relevant and comprehensive results than a search engine. Another great resource is a research search engine, which will search only for research published in academic books, journals, and other periodicals. One of the best research search engines is Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) as it has a wide variety of resources. For example, if you type, “binge drinking” into Google Scholar, the search engine will identify about 58,200 scholarly results.