ENGL 1A - Smith

Description

• Websites are online spaces that host a multitude of content. The collection of content for a website is within the same domain. (In the example below, sfdph.gov is the domain).
  • Examples:
    • Website Name: San Francisco Department of Public Health
    • Website Address (URL): https://www.sfdph.org

What do they contain?

• Webpages (which contain articles, blog posts, etc)
  • Example
    • Webpage: Environmental Health
    • From the Website: San Francisco Department of Public Health

How often are these sources published?

• Continuously

Found on:

• The "open web." Search engines "crawl" and "index" items found in the open web, such as webpages, blog posts, infographics, PDFs, and other material that people post to the web. The open web contains materials not behind a paywall (such as when an online journal website asks for payment to show you an article). Databases are technically behind a paywall, because they contain material that is accessed after the library pays a subscription fee.

In general, we recommend searching CCSF Library resources first, because they contain material that is not freely available on the open web. However, there is lots material on the open web that is not in the library! Therefore, combining these efforts (searching library resources, and then searching the open web) can be effective.

Icon made by Freepik

Searching for information on the web efficiently requires developing a search strategy. Take your topic and think how you will turn it into search terms. While you can certainly search the web by entering a question, a stronger search strategy would be to choose the most impactful words of your question, and shape it in a way that the search engine understands.

If your research question is "What is the best solution to homelessness in the Bay Area?" the most essential elements to find are solution, homelessness, and the Bay Area. It can help to brainstorm alternatives to the words IN your research question, because different words will surface different results in your search.

Note: the quotation marks around some search terms help tell the search engine that you want results with the words stuck together exactly as you have them.

Combining three of my search concepts, a sample Google search is shown below.