Information on the World Wide Web is organized into Web sites. Each site contains at least one page and many sites contain dozens to hundreds of pages. In fact, there are more than 800 million pages on the Web [Nature 400(6740): 107-109, July 8, 1999], and this number is increasing rapidly.

With so many pages available, you need search strategies for finding sites that are valuable to you. Since anyone with a computer can publish on the Web, from government agencies to scholars and experts to the person next door, you will need techniques to evaluate the sites you find.

In this module, we will help you learn to find and evaluate Web sites, and to use search tools, such as search engines and subject directories, to find useful sites quickly and easily. You can practice by trying out the guided exercises,"Searching Yahoo" and "Searching Alta Vista."