Depending upon the subject matter and your own preferences, there are several ways you can pursue all these clues to information. A deep search, where you are usually looking for some detail or a specific fact, will tend to follow links down to the bitter end - gradually narrowing the search down, perhaps to a particular authority by following links through from search engines to hubs to more specific hubs, and so on.

In contrast, when researching a broader subject, or getting a feel for the scope of information available in a certain area, you will be more likely to try a shallow search, skimming through large lists of search results and briefly looking at pages that seem relevant, without following them up in depth. It can often be useful to bookmark these pages for later use, when searching deeper into the subject. See also (Hölscher, 2000) and (Ozmutlu, 2004).