[Excerpted and slightly condensed from Message 75, Topic 16: Tools for Building Business-Related Community, in Barnraising.]

1. You need to decide if you are searching or surfing. Searching means when you find a neat link on a related but not pertinent topic, you bookmark it for later. Surfing means you spend twenty minutes in a digression.
2. You need to know when you know enough. You can search most subjects for days on end. But if you know the main places to search, and you've gone from there, you have to figure out when to stop searching. This is especially important if you do this for a living and want to make more than $1.99 an hour. It's like doing a paper in college on some subject where there are 400 books on it in the library. Even after you narrow your focus some, there are still 200 books. Are you going to look through them all? Through the most recent ones (not always the best strategy)? Through the ones you touch first? Through the ones you hit when blindfolded and throwing darts? It's the same thing on the net.
3. You need to know when it's faster or makes more sense to pick up a book or go to the library. Printed Web directories, for instance, are often a good investment. They're faster than search engines, more precise (who needs 30,000 hits, 29,990 of them vapid, and who knows which ten are the good ones?), already researched, not subject to net lag... and they lead to anything else that's new, cool or worthwhile.
4. You need to read books on how to do net searching and what the professional searchers do. One of the best is "Secrets of the Net Super Searchers" by Reva Basch. She puts you right inside the mind of the professional net searcher. Her intro alone is worth the price of the book. She writes the cybernaut column for Computer Life, and is well-known among cybrarians.

-- Ragged Claws (wallace@raggedclaws.com), September 15, 1998