Whether you are working on a school project, marketing campaign or budget planning, mind mapping can always be helpful in finding the way to finish your assignments easier and in a more organized fashion. But sometimes in order to complete the picture, we need additional information other than our ideas, suggestions or the facts we know. Of course the best source of information is his Majesty, the Internet. A new study has determined that for the first time, search engines and Internet have trumped printed yellow pages for searchers looking for information. But not always the information we are looking for is easy to get to, a lot of effort and time are needed, piles of web pages are opened and closed and still nothing. Why?
Statistics say there are:
- –4 billion searches per day
- –175 million per hour
- –2.9 million searches per minute
- –1 trillion pages of content on the net
- –150 pages content per person alive
Therefore in this article I will share with you several useful tips that will help you get the best research results and map them into your project or assignment.
Start with what you know
The first thing you need to do is visit your favorite websites related to the research topic. You already know the way they are organized and you can easily navigate and search for the relevant content. Also you can ask your friends to recommend their favorite websites; people have different habits and perspective when it comes to information exploration.
The internet is more than just Google
We often make the same mistake over and over again, we think of Google as the first and last place for data search. But the experience shows that although major commercial search engines often return similar results, they work differently enough that you should use several search engines for every research project to help you uncover different resources.
Results are not always on the first side
Sometimes, we are eager to find fast and reliable information and we read only the first page results of our search. From my experience every time I searchfor information it shows up after the first 3 pages of search results. Some websites are very good at making their content rank high in search engines for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of their content. So whenever your start your internet investigation, be thorough and patient.
Use different phrases
Say it otherwise. Practice different phrases and related keywords and search for them in order to get the results wanted. Search engines have different way of ranking website’s content and by combining several related keywords you will certainly find better results. You can also limit searches say to a specific kind of data, such as news or blogs, books or set alerts to get the newest info on related topic.
Use tabs
We often lose relevant data jumping form one page to another, following related link and articles.If you are reading an article and you see a link you want to open, use another tab. You can open multiple pages in this manner without losing your place on the current page. This way you can stay more organized, more focused and never lose important information.
Bookmark or map you pages
While searching you can find content that is interesting but not relevant to your current needs. Bookmark it; maybe it will be useful in the future. Another option is to use automatic map building in DropMind.
The great thing is that this mind mapping software has integrated browser with the ability to drag and drop web content, links and images into a mind map, which is a better way of saving your effort and time while doing a research or a project. This functionality will become significant research tool, as we continue to struggle with information overload and time management.
Recent survey regarding mind mapping showed that over one-third of respondents (35.8%) said their mind mapping software helps them to manage information overload ?to a big extent.
Therefore combine this search tips and quality mind map software such as DropMind to effortlessly find and organize your relevant information. It will surely save you lot of effort and time.