See theme

When I graduated from college in 2002, my professors strongly encouraged me to avoid using the Internet as a research source for any of my final papers. Less than five years later, however, a major shift has occured. During that time span, news organizations that once viewed the World Wide Web as a source of competition have embraced it as a quick and efficient way to disseminate their stories. Consequently, the Internet has developed into an accurate and reliable source of information—when used properly.

This transition has been especially beneficial for preachers because it provides an excellent way to find material for sermon illustrations. However, as the Internet continues to grow at an exponential rate, a new problem has arisen: information overload. How can preachers find accurate, reliable sources of information without wasting a lot of time wading through an overabundance of junk?

Ted Olsen, creator of Christianity Today's popular "Weblog," and thus someone who searches the Web for a living, recently advised his fellow editors how to search smart.

It's a Google world.

Most Internet searches these days begin with Google, and for good reason. However, if you look for a news story or quotation using Google's main search engine, you'll probably have to hack your way through a forest of blog commentaries and Amazon.com book pages in order to secure the information you need.

As an alternative, try a Google News search. To get there, go to Google's main page and click on the word "News" above the search bar (or type http://www.news.google.com into your web browser's address field). This feature allows you to search over 4,500 news sources that are each updated continuously, meaning that you can find up-to-the-minute results without encountering unwanted information.

If you are looking for an older story, the Google News Archive Search can be a lifesaver. To access this feature, click on the words "News archive search" located in the top-right section of the Google News main page (or http://www.news.google.com/archivesearch). In addition to searching several news archives for stories, Google will also create a timeline to help you see the coverage of people or events down through the years.

Google's Domain Search allows you to limit your results even further by searching for stories and quotations from a single website. For example, if you are preparing a sermon and remember something you read from Leadership Journal that would make a perfect illustration (or if you want to get Leadership's take on your sermon topic), you can use the Domain Search to find content only from www.christianitytoday.com.

To use this feature, go to Google's main page and click on the words "Advanced Search," located to the right of the search bar (or type http://www.google.com/advanced_search). Here you will see a variety of restrictions that can be placed on a search, but the Domain restriction is about halfway down the white part of the box. You can also skip the Advanced Search window by typing in the word "site:" in the main Google search page and then adding the domain. For example, if you were searching for articles about truth from Christianity Today, you would type "truth site:christianitytoday.com" into the Google search bar.

Using Christianitytoday.com

Christianitytoday.com can be an excellent research tool on religious topics, offering access to all of CTI's magazines, websites, and channels. It also has a search engine of its own. Start by visiting the homepage. In the top-right corner, you'll find the search bar. To conduct a general search, enter a keyword into the bar and click "search." For example, you could start with "Billy Graham." The next page lists 2,454 articles that match the search criteria, which is obviously a few too many. However, you can refine your search in two important ways.

First, you can enter another keyword, like "Iraq," and then click the box marked "within current results." The next page will list only the Billy Graham matches that include the word "Iraq"—in this case, we get 390 results.

The second way to manage your results is to limit the number of channels that are involved in the search. This can be done by selecting a channel from the drop-menu located below the search bar. For example, having searched for "Billy Graham," we can then limit the results to matches from "Leadershipjournal.net only." You can also add another keyword and combine this feature with the "… within current results" method to really refine the results.

Recent articles found on Christianitytoday.com can be accessed for free. The majority of the archived articles on Christianitytoday.com have been folded into what is known as the CT Library. This is a subscription-based service that offers unlimited access to every article printed in Christianity Today, Leadership Journal, Books and Culture, Christian History & Biography, and over 50 volumes of Leadership books. If you are not a member of the CT Library, you will be able to access the first 250 words of each article for free.

Three other useful sites

If you don't find the information you need through Google News, another good alternative is Yahoo! News, which often turns up material that Google leaves out. To use this search, go to Yahoo!'s main page and locate the search bar in the top-right corner of the screen. Click on the word "News" above the bar in order to limit your search results to news sources. You can also search from http://www.news.yahoo.com, which gives you the added benefit of reading the top news headlines of the day.

If you are looking for information on events happening outside of the U.S., http://www.worldnews.com is a great source for international news. Again, the homepage will provide you with the top international headlines of the day, and the search bar is located in the top-middle section of the screen.

Finally, A9 is a service from Amazon.com that provides the best way to search for quotations and excerpts from books. To access this feature, you'll find a bar labeled "A9 Web Search" in the top-right section of Amazon's homepage. Or you can type in http://www.a9.com, where you have access to more restrictions and filters in order to refine your search results even further.

Sam O'Neal is managing editor of Discipleship Resources at Christianity Today International.