Research on the Net

The Internet is bulging with information and opportunities for communication. There is at least one trillion pages on the World Wide Web, millions of weblogs being kept by individuals, several million videos hosted at YouTube (just one of several video sites), millions of messages in archived discussion groups and web forums, thousands of chat groups, not to mention the 1.5 billion people who can be reached through e-mail. Fortunately, there are tools to help us find what we need.

Resource Types

Information on every conceivable subject can be found in some form through the Web. The information may have a commercial and promotional slant, or carry academic credentials, or be the product of very personal and idiosyncratic taste.

The most common form is the Web page, the kind of page that you are reading now. The World Wide Web rivals, and possibly surpasses, the printing press in impact as a publishing technology. The Web is ubiquitous and it is cheap.

There are other resource types:

• Databases provide specialized information such as statistics, economic data, reports, articles, public records, or patents. Much can be obtained for free, some cost money.
• Videos flood the Internet today, the work of professionals and amateurs in the form of film clips, news stories, lectures, ads, personal stories, and amusing flicks about pets.
• Audio files and podcasts capture musical bands, readings, radio shows, lectures and lessons.
• Images flourish through web-based services for personal online photo albums, in addition to the collections at museums and galleries as well as other special collection repositories.
• Maps give pinpoint detail on directions to places, local services, aerial views of streets, street-level views of the buildings. MapQuest was the first, but there are several others, including views of the entire globe from Google Earth and Microsoft's Bing Maps.
• Weblogs (blogs) are daily journals of comments. These usually have very personal bent but some are professional in manner and content and have become key information resources.
• Wikis encourage people to work together to create content. Wikipedia is the world's largest encyclopedia.
• Microblogs allow people to send out brief text updates or single photos or videos. Twitter is the microblog king and is used by news providers, companies, and the guy on the street.
• Social networks, like MySpace and Facebook, are used for connecting with friends, colleagues, and groups.
• RSS feeds deliver news headlines and blog postings to the desktop.
• Software downloads are available from vendors.
• Mailing lists are a subscription-based way (albeit somewhat old fashioned now) for participating in discussion via email.
• Message boards support group discussion on topics directly on the web. These tend to be built into blogs.
• Instant messaging, chat, and online conferences bring people together in real-time. Today these have video and audio capabilities.

The Web is the structure that holds all of this together. Search engines like Google and Bing index much of this content and are able to match your query with pages. Directories on the Web help us find entertainment events in our city along with video previews of movies, phone numbers of long lost friends, information on companies and their products. Headline news is supplied from online newspapers and through news search engines and aggregators. Online map services give us driving directions to places. Catalogs and services in libraries can be accessed over the Web directly. The commercial online databases services, such as Factiva, Dialog and LexisNexis, with their storehouses of news, journal articles and proprietary research are also part of the Web world.

The Web is the interface to the Internet. We can read today's news, send e-mail, talk with friends, buy our books and music and anything else, do our banking, watch film clips, find customers and sell services, and pursue all manner of personal interests.

Where to next?

Read about the basic tools on the Web in this page about Research Tools.