There are four main strategies for locating Web materials:
Surfing - following links from one Web page to another, using intuition
Catalogues - benefiting from other peoples' work in listing Web sites
Search engines - finding pages which contain combinations of words
Favorites and bookmarks - a list of sites that reflects your interests

Surfing
New Web users enjoy following links from one Web page to another, a fine way to investigate this new medium. Interesting material is often found, but it is easy to be deflected from the task in hand, or miss the best information. Surfing can be an effective way to find similar Web sites after locating a good site by other methods. However, a great deal of time can be wasted surfing and pupils can become frustrated unless they learn more efficient search techniques. A good search strategy should answer the questions "Have I found the best sources?" and "Can I prove there is nothing useful on this topic?"

Catalogues and Lists
The Web is just 10 years' old, but many people have catalogued useful resources, potentially saving the rest of us much time and trouble. Subject catalogues (also known as subject directories) are compiled by groups of editors with the result that the quality of sites included is generally higher than that produced by the "grab everything" approach of search engines. An editor can only review perhaps 50 sites a day, or 10,000 sites each year and even a large team cannot cover more than a few percent of the Web. The first large Web catalogue Yahoo is over six years old and places resources in top-level categories such as Science, Health, Arts and Humanities.

Lists often cover a single topic and those produced by authors with similar interests to the user can be most useful. Some schools have published on their Web site lists of Web sites, books and other resources relating to specific homework or examination topics. The Catalogues page describes a range of catalogues, directories and specialist lists.

Search Engines
A book's index lists words that the author considers important, giving the page on which they occur. Its huge scale makes indexing of the whole Web by people impossible. A search engine produces an index of a substantial part of the Web by using automatic programs called spiders or robots. The spider visits Web sites which have been registered or it finds through links to known sites. The which engine? page describes several types of search engine.

To use a search engine to locate Web materials, the user enters one or more search terms. The engine searches the index for these terms and retrieves the addresses of Web pages that contain them. The skill is in predicting words that will occur on suitable pages, but are not so common as to appear on other sites. Due to their speed, search engines are effective in finding Web pages, often thousands, which contain the terms. However, unless the user chooses suitable search terms, many of the Web sites may be unconnected with the topic being researched. The search tips page describes how to put effective searches together.

Favorites and Bookmarks
The ideal list of useful Web sites would be one compiled by yourself - if you had the time! However, just listing Web addresses (URLs) is not ideal as mistakes in copying can easily be made. The Internet Explorer Web browser includes a feature called 'favorites' while Netscape uses 'bookmarks', which are methods of recording good sites under their page title. Favorites or bookmarks can be organised into folders under different topic or theme names. When a 'favorite' is clicked on, the URL (address) is automatically loaded into the browser and the Web site retrieved.

One use of Favorites would be to give pupils a list of several Web sites that have been checked by the teacher for a particular topic. The pupils have some choice in deciding which sites to use, but the teacher knows that the pupils should gain some useful information from any of the sites.