The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet: Conducting Effective Free Investigative & Legal Research on the Web

The Cybersleuth s Guide to the Internet is meant to be a guide to free and low cost resources for any one who needs to conduct investigative and legal research on the Internet. The book starts off at the beginning laying out Web browser functions some Web users might be less familiar with. It then lays the groundwork of how search engines locate and retrieve the information we re searching for before it moves on to discuss more sophisticated search techniques and then how to apply those techniques to other Web sites to locate the information we re looking for.

Because the vast majority of sites discussed in this book are freely available on the Internet many of these resources could be located through Web searches if you had the time to conduct those searches, sift through all of the results, and test out the sites until you had culled down the millions of potential sites to a list of the most credible, relevant, and useful.

The Cybersleuth s Guide to the Internet is a reference book; it is not meant to be read cover to cover. We have tried to organize this book the way researchers think by keeping like topics together. There are a number of concepts and search strategies that are applicable to types of research we discuss in different chapters. Therefore, some strategies appear in more than one place in the book to keep the back and forth page flipping to a minimum.