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If you are not familiar with the Internet, you might want to start with a tutorial.

There is plenty of them available on the Internet. You can have access to them by going to the following Website:

NetLearn Directory of Internet Learning Resources

NetLearn is a directory of resources for learning and teaching Internet skills, including resources for WWW, email and other formats. Links with descriptive and evaluative annotations are provided, covering: learning, teaching, navigating and providing information on the Internet; learning HTML; demographics; special needs and foreign language resources.

ITrain Internet Training Materials

ITrain is a project of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and is managed by Bellanet. The goal of ITrain is to create flexible, effective, gender and culture sensitive training materials about the Internet. They explain ways to engage learners and help the training participants to investigate the relevance of the Internet to their communication needs. The materials are written in accessible language and lay-out. They are designed to be flexible so the course content can be customised to suit the learners' needs and experiences. Each of the modules are created to be taught in a participatory learning environment where the instructor is as well teacher as coach as participant in the learning process.

The website includes training materials in French.

If you want to more specifically learn about Internet Search, you might go to the following websites to find ad hoc tutorials:

Tutorial Guide to Effective Searching of the Internet

Here is Complete Planet's award winning tutorial on harnessing the internet to improve the quality of your search results. Download the pdf file (file size 980Kb - 2 min. 16 sec. at 56k). For a listing of other web based tutorials, see Resource Sites

BARE BONES 101 A Very Basic Web Search Tutorial

So, you're still getting those 1,670,000+ responses to your search queries on the Web, and you're still too busy to do anything about it, like reading the lengthy, and sometimes confusing, "help" screens to find out how to improve your searching techniques. Look no further! Real help is here, in the USCB Library's BARE BONES Tutorial. You can zip through these lessons in no time, any time. They are very short and succinct; each can be read in a few minutes. Feel free to jump in wherever you like, skip what you don't want to read, and come back whenever you need to. The information contained in the following lessons is truly "bare bones," designed to get you started in the right direction with a minimum of time and effort. For more comprehensive and detailed help on searching the Web, consult our recommended list of sites in Lesson 20 at the end of this tutorial

If you don’t have any (or little) idea of what is available on the Web in terms of Health or Biomedical Information and Training Resources, you might want to start with the following tutorials. They are good introductions for an uninitiated (and even initiated!) someone…

Health Science Distance Learning
Applications on the Internet

Health Science Distance Learning Applications on the Internet

This resource provides an overview to the varied biomedical information and education resources on the Web. It covers search engines, directories, online databases, journals, and educational materials. The latter is a sampling of the range of materials and applications available, not a comprehensive list.

RDN Virtual Training Suite

The Virtual Training Suite is a set of online tutorials designed to help students, lecturers and researchers improve their Internet information skills. The tutorials offer self-directed learning, take around an hour each to complete, and include quizzes and interactive exercises to lighten the learning experience. To directly access the tutorials on

Health and biomedicine, clic on Internet Medic or Internet Bioresearcher.

http://nnlm.gov/healthinfoquest/

HEALTHINFOQUEST pathfinders are designed for public librarians and health information specialists. Each HEALTHINFOQUEST pathfinder stands alone and demonstrates ways to answer sample questions using authoritative and reliable resources.

If you are not familiar with how to evaluate health information on a website, you might find what you need on the following websites; there are Tutorials…


 http://www.desire.org/detective/

The Internet Detective, produced by the DESIRE project with funding from the European Union, is an interactive Web-based tutorial, complete with supporting materials for teachers and trainers, that aims to teach people to evaluate the quality of information that they find via the Internet.

Articles…


Published criteria for evaluating health related web sites: British Medical Journal review
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7184/647#

Quality Assessment of Internet Sites-Centre for Health Information Quality 1998 Topic Bulletin 2 http://www.hfht.org/downloads/TB2%20for%20website.pdf

Guidelines…

BIOME Special Advisory Group on Evaluation
http://biome.ac.uk/sage/

And a Code of Conduct

http://www.hon.ch/HONcode/Conduct.html

The Health on the Net Foundation Code of Conduct (HONcode) for medical and health Web sites addresses one of Internet's main healthcare issues: the reliability and credibility of information.

And many other Websites with criteria for evaluating information resources

http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm

This page contains pointers to criteria for evaluating information resources, particularly those on the Internet. It is intended to be particularly useful to librarians and others who are selecting sites to include in an information resource guide, or informing users as to the qualities they should use in evaluating Internet information.