Chapter 3
Researching Your Need Statement on the Web

The purpose of Chapter 3 is to help you improve your need statement by adding verifiable facts and statistics to enhance the scope and justification of your project. Specifically, this chapter is designed to help you gather additional information on your problem and to identify and construct arguments about your proposed solution that will demonstrate that your project is timely, urgent, and compelling. Chapter 3 builds on the need statements that you wrote in Chapter 2. To locate statistical data, you will learn about general Internet search strategies and examine examples of Internet searches. Then you will learn how to integrate the information that you find on the Web into a revised need statement.

Learner Outcomes

After completing this chapter, you will be able to
  1. Identify keywords

  2. Use basic search strategies for the Internet

  3. Find relevant facts and statistics related to your project on the Internet

  4. Incorporate the information you find on the Internet into your revised need statement

Key Terms

Boolean logic—Boolean logic uses + and - symbols to include or exclude multiple keywords in an Internet search. If you use + in front of a word, you are requiring that word be present in the search result sites. If you use - in front of a word, you are excluding all sites that contain that word from your search results. Combinations of + and - symbols are used to help you get targeted results from your Internet searches.

Broadening your search results—Broadening your search results is useful when you do not get many hits. Strategies to help you broaden your search include using synonyms for your keywords, rechecking your typing and spelling, and trying different search engines.

Hit—A hit is a Web page that is returned to you in your search results. Most search engines will tell you how many hits your search criteria deliver, allowing you to decide whether you need to broaden or narrow your search results.

Keywords—Keywords are words that identify substantive nouns, action verbs, or crucial content in your need statement. The keywords can then be used to search for additional information on the Internet.

Meta-search engine—A meta-search engine uses a number of different search engines and pulls the results together for you. Meta-search engines tend to deliver few, but more targeted results.

Narrowing your search results—Narrowing your search results is useful when you get more results than you can possibly scan. You can use Boolean logic to narrow your search results.

Search engine—A search engine is a Website that catalogs and keeps track of part of the Internet. No search engine has the capacity to track the entire Internet, so using a variety of search engines can give you different results. Search engines list pages for paying clients, send out spiders that look for and catalog new pages, and list pages that have been submitted to the search engine for cataloging. An example of a search engine is Altavista.

Search Index—A search index is an index of pages on the Web that are searchable and are arranged in hierarchical form. An example of a search index is Yahoo.com.

Search Strategies—Search strategies are planned approaches to help you get the most targeted results possible from your Web searches, such as using keywords, combining keywords, using Boolean logic, using quotation marks to specify phrases, using multiple search engines, and using synonyms.

Spiders—Spiders are small programs often sent out by search engines to travel around the Web and catalog pages.

URL—URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. URLs are unique names for different Websites. An example of a URL is http://www.sitename.org.

Summary

In Chapter 3, you have been asked to provide more relevant evidence and stronger arguments to justify your problem and proposed solution to potential sponsors. This kind of information often appears as part of the justification and scope in your need statement. To find this information, you can always go to the reference librarians in your university or community library. You can also often find this information online on the Internet.

In Chapter 3, we discussed how to use the Internet effectively to find information and statistics relevant to your proposal. You have had an opportunity to create keyword lists, use search engines to locate information, and you have also seen some strategies for searching more effectively. By following the examples, you have seen how proposal writers use these strategies to find data and information to help them generate arguments to convince a sponsor that their projects are timely, urgent, compelling.

Now that you have completed this chapter, you should be able to conduct efficient Internet searches:

  • by identifying keywords in your need statement,

  • by determining how and when to narrow your search results with quotation marks and Boolean Logic, and

  • by determining how and when to broaden your results by working with URLs and using multiple search engines.

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