Make online searching a snap

Looking for some particular information? www.50plus.com contains thousands of articles and helpful resources with a 50plus focus. Now, searching the article archive is simpler and faster. Let your cursor do the scrolling down the directory listed on each 50plus.com section page. You get direct access to the articles you want with a minimum of search time.

With the 50plus.com directory, you select a topic, click, and go right to the headlines and précis of the most recent articles on that topic. At the bottom of each page, you can click and go further back into the archive.

For example, on the Health Section page, you’ll see ‘Nutrition and Weight’ in the Health directory. If you keep clicking, you’ll find over 70 articles on Nutrition and Weight from past issues of CARPNews FiftyPlus and the 50plus.com web site.

It’s an online library of free information. And 50plus.com is just one of many sites where you can search for specific information. In fact, the Internet is the great equalizer for anyone who lives outside big centres where research libraries exist.

Organized searching
But searching line can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s helpful to get organized about your search technique.

You can browse the Net using effective search engines like AltaVista (www.altavista.ca), Yahoo ( www.yahoo.ca ), Google (www.google.ca ). There are many others, but these three are very good.

These offer you a ‘keyword’ search box where you plug in the word or couple of words describing your topic. Since precision is everything with this type of search, it’s helpful to check the search guidelines on each search site. Try mastering the search techniques on one site and use it consistently to shorten the time you spend getting to information.

Questions, information
Then there are search engines which crawl around all the other search engines looking for your information. These are ‘meta data’ search engines. They do a simultaneous search of dozens of search engines and cough up the results for you.

One excellent tool of this search is Copernic (www.copernic.com ). You phrase your search request as a question, which is more user friendly.
The site developed by journalist and teacher Julian Sher (www.journalismnet.com ) is a great resource for finding news, current affairs and government information from around the world.

Government documents
One important development in online searching is the availability of many government documents. You can now search court records for many Canadian jurisdictions, do land title searches and access other government documents.

Some provinces, such as Manitoba, have surged ahead with online accessibility for official documents. To find out what’s available in your region, search out the URL or web site name for the government department you seek. Google or Journalismnet.com are two good places to start.

Once you get to the government site, use the site map to navigate around the various departments.
 
It’s possible to waste a lot of time trying to find nuggets of information on the web. Refining your technique will take time. But whether you’re an information junkie or a consumer simply searching for some facts and figures, the Internet is an electronic research library at your fingertips.