To find specific course material

• We can start with the World Lecture Hall and then from there the Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry or Elec/Comp Eng pages. What we find is that these are almost all undergraduate courses, and the number of entries for postgraduate courses is growing only slowly.

For specialist searches (e.g. in Surface Physics)

• First, we can hit the Net Search button. Then, realising that this is a zoo, you can ask around which search engine is best for scientific work, and to find something involving both surface and physics maybe you chose
• Alta Vista surface + physics, and I scroll through to find bits of my course starting at #32 out of over 1,000,000 entries, not bad, but what are all these entries?..the search needs to be more specific: hit Advanced!
• An Alta Vista advanced search on "surface" AND "thin films" NEAR course in the Boolean box, and now there are around 90 entries, including some of my own, and some of the relevant ones I know about independently, but the adverts are getting to me. The entries can be quite out of date - it may pay to insert META tags in the headers, and to submit one or more sites direct to e.g. Alta Vista, or Lycos.
• In 1999 & 2000 better alternatives seem to be alltheweb.com and google.com which, in preliminary searching, I have found to be highly specific: for example, ("surfaces and thin films" + course) in both of these finds my new course pages, whereas ("surface physics" + course) finds Furio Ercolessi in Trieste, with little overlap between the two lists.
• In addition, one can do a multi-source search via the aptly-named Dogpile.com ... or the more neutral Search.com. Search engine junkies will know about Searchenginewatch.com. In general, the number of hits one gets varies each time you ask, and on the most commercial sites, adverts have become quite annoying and time-wasting. If you get round to it, you can suppress all Javascript and/or sites with you find objectionable. Survival methods are becoming akin to 'nature red in tooth and claw'.. what did we expect? For advanced (Boolean) searching methods consult, e.g. Alta Vista advanced help.