Finding information on the Internet can be like trying to find a specific item in a junkyard.

• There are several reasons for this. Anyone can - and anyone does - put up a web page.
• Content and format are not standardized.
• There are no indexing conventions.

Committees of librarians from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada worked to develop cataloging rules. Punctuation marks, forms of names and places, and other elements have been standardized so the information on catalog records is the same, no matter which automation system a library uses. No such standardization exists for Internet web pages.

Librarians have also standardized subject headings. A person can go to any library, in person or through the Internet, and use the same subject search terms in the Library of Congress or the smallest public library. In contrast, there are no standardized subject headings for the Internet, nor is there a standard location for information about the website.

Because the Internet has not lent itself to being organized, people have developed a variety of methods to search the web. (Otherwise, finding information online would be like searching for a needle in a haystack without knowing which haystack contains the needle, or what the needle itself looks like.) The search sites listed here are taken from guides prepared by Carole Leita of the InFoPeople project, supported by the U.S. institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.

Selected Internet Subject Directories
Subject Directory Database

Selected Internet Meta-Search Engines
Meta-Search Engine Database

Selected Internet Search Engines
Search Engine Database