I first searched the Internet using Yahoo because it is a Subject Directory which is very easy to search. I found that "phrase searching" using quotes produced results on target more often than Boolean Logic or using any punctuation between terms of a phrase. When the phrase "algebra I graphing" was used as a search query, ninety-seven web pages were returned. Most of the pages were not useful. They contained sites for Algebra textbooks, on-line courses, university courses, and a variety of other topics. Other search queries also proved to return mostly irrelevant information. Searching the Internet using Hotbot and Alta Vista and using similar phrases yielded the same type of results obtained with Yahoo.

I decided to search several databases simultaneously using the search engine MetaCrawler and search phrases, such as "algebra lessons". Again, most of the web pages returned were not useful. However MetaCrawler did return pages containing very good sites that I wanted to use for this project. The best sites were returned by the Metacrawler's search of Infoseek. I decided to complete a search using the Search Engine Infoseek, which contains a sub-searching feature for refining searches. Infoseek returned excellent sites and was also very easy to use. In addition, the web pages returned were labeled as to the quality of the page. This helped me determine which sites to include in my Web page.

The second phase of my search included using the subject directories of each of the search engines that I had chosen. The Directory Search of each search engine proved to be very productive. A large number of excellent sites, which were included in this project, were found using Yahoo's Directory Search and Alta Vista's Category search. Since Hotbot's Directory Search contained links similar to those of Yahoo as well as a link to the mathematics resources in the Yahoo directory, I decided not to use Hotbot. Infoseek's Directory Search was also very easy to use and produced excellent results. Searching the Infoseek Directory was faster than searching the other Directories because the topic of mathematics was sub-divided into subject headings making it easier to focus on a topic. I also found sites in the Infoseek Directory that were not listed in the other Directories that I had searched.

After finding most of the sites that I wanted to include in my Web page using the Directory Search, I began to check out the links included in several of the sites that I had found. Several of these links proved to be excellent choices for my page. I used the Evaluation Criteria that I had established for sites that were to be included in my Web page to determine exactly which sites that I wanted to use.