Useful Links for Navigating Internet Resources
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CONTENTS for INTERNET RESOURCE LINKS
FINDING WHAT YOU NEED
There are three basic types of tool to help you search the Internet: directories, search engines, and meta-search engines. Here are my favorites:
Yahoo! is probably the most developed human constructed Internet directory. If you are not sure about keywords to narrow your search, use Yahoo to browse likely categories.
Google has become the most popular single search engine today. It automatically indexes the Internet and then sorts results based on algorithms that take previous user's choices into account.
Search.com (formerly Savvysearch) is a meta-search engine that sends your query simultaneously to over one hundred individual search engines and tallies their collective results.
Search Engine Watch reviews and rates search engines, offers helpful tips for searching, and current reports on their functionality.
Just because a website is changed or updated and the page you want is no longer available on the Internet does not mean that you still can't find it! The Internet Archive features the "Wayback Machine" that allows you to access stored versions of webpages dating all the way back to 1996. It also features ever growing archives of other cultural products, such as text, audio, and video.
Finally, Yahoo! has another directory full of categorized Internet search related sites to explore.
EVALUATING WHAT YOU FIND
Henderson's (2003) ICYouSee: A Guide to the World Wide Web covers web searches, finding more focused disciplinary resources, and critically evaluating information found on the Internet.
Several adacemics, librarians, and web directors have also posted useful guides to evaluative web content. In general, those criteria are no different from any other form of textual evaluation — however, since just about anyone can post just about anything to the web without any sort of governance, it falls to you to be especially vigilant about the quality of your web sources. They all have similar advice, but compare two or three, just to get a feel for the issues. Here are a few of them:
GENERAL REFERENCE WORKS
These references should be helpful to clarify a point from lecture, discussion, or readings, but they cannot count toward your official sources for writing assignments in your class.
OneLook is my favorite online dictionary. It is actually a "meta-dictionary" that simultaneously searches over 900 dictionaries so that you can compare the resulting definitions. It also contains a list of links for those dictionaries that you can browse.
Just a few virtual collections of general reference works (dictionaries, atlases, encyclopedias, etc.):
The Yahoo! Reference directory also categorizes a wealth of relevant sites.
BASIC SOCIAL SCIENCE REFERENCES
Albert Benschop (University of Amsterdam) oversees SocioSite — probably the largest single sociology website.
Michael C. Kearl (Trinity University) maintains A Sociological Tour through Cyberspace — a large website with special features that introduce you to available Internet resources for sociology.
Larry R. Ridener (Radford University) has a useful and humorous online sociology with his Dead Sociologist's Society.
The Sociology Webring connects a growing number of disciplanary sites.
The UK-based Social Sciences Information Gateway (SOSIG) contains categorized links for many social science fields — including sociology and social psychology.
The Social Psychology Network, maintained by Scott Plous (Wesleyan University), is the most comprehensive gateway to Internet resources in the field.