Read the story of the pyramid, an essential prioritized search strategy in the hunt for relevant information.

• People Direct. Use these search tools to look for ways to interact with people, businesses, agencies and institutions.
• SUP Database and FAQ. Your hunt might seek interesting questions which different people have been trying to solve. Try these instead of a cross-word puzzle! This database is accumulating problems and contributions to their solutions. Please add your own questions and contributions to this ongoing effort to link community questions with school-student answering capability.

• Physical Library Systems (Print/AudioVisual). Use these links to resources kept on the world's shelves, including paper and audio-visual technologies. Library card catalogs and article databases will tell you whether the book or article exists. These systems may lead you to other online technologies which provide, often for a fee, the full text of a document. Otherwise these are primarily citation oriented systems. You must visit the existing library system or use Inter-Library loan to read the publication.

The thing layer provides a strategy for selecting and using a multitude of search engines to find the complete text of documents, or actual images, videoclips and sounds, whether for free or for a fee.

• The Shallow or Surface Web Use these links to reach the public Internet, the resources stored electronically on the world's public hard drives.
• The Deep Web
Use these links to reach the resources that often require a fee and are behind passwords, or are in databases which generate their pages dynamically and therefore cannot index their pages.