There are a number of ways to find agricultural information on the Web or Internet including:
Web Portals
An increasingly popular tool on the web is the web portal. The web portal is collection of links to select website and documents within a specific topic area.
The British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture and Lands currently has the InfoBasket web portal. Available on the Internet, this tool producers and processors to easily access the information they require to make business decisions for many aspects of their business: from growing a particular commodity, to processing that commodity, to selling the final product.
The tool is designed to be agri-food producers' and processors' one-stop shop for information on the Internet. As of March 2005, InfoBasket has over 22 communities in the web portal including: : 4-H Youth & Community Development, Agritourism, Agroforestry, Apiculture, Beef, Berries, Bioproducts, Bison, Field Vegetables, Food, Beverage & Nutraceutical Processing, Forage, Freshwater Aquaculture, Game Birds, Goats, Grains, Grapes, Oilseeds, Pulses, and Forage Seeds, Greenhouse Vegetables, Organics, Ornamentals, Range, Ratites (Ostriches, Rheas, & Emus), Sheep & Lambs, Specialty Crops, Tree Fruits, and Waterfowl.
For the client, they no longer have to search through numerous sites to find the information they need; they have a single window into the information as the BCMAL specialists have linked to information sources from around the world, including governments, universities and research institutes.
Using General Topic Search Engines
A
quick method is to use one of the several search engines on the web.
These are sites that use hypertext searching software to sift
through millions of references on any given topic on the Internet.
Many of the engines have agriculture indexes including Yahoo (website).
To operate a search engine you must first go to its web site by
using its URL or web address.
Then you simply type the keyword of the topic in which you are
interested and the program searches the web for any URL's and HTML
titles and addresses that contains some reference to your topic. The
search engine then presents a summary list of web sites that include
the search word or words. Sites or information with the highest
occurrence of the words are listed first. You can then click on one
of the web addresses from the list to go to that particular web
site. A good general web search engine to try is Google.ca.
Locating References to Web Addresses in Printed Materials 
Another way to find information is by referring to printed materials. Various agriculture publications, brochures and advertisements often have a list of sites related to what they are talking about or their products. Many large and small companies, research departments, and government agencies now have web sites and list them in their printed materials (e.g., USDA Report http://www.usdareports.com/ or Agriculture Canada Market Reports http://www.agr.gc.ca/progser/apmip_e.phtml).
Visiting Known Agriculture Web Sites and Looking for
Hyperlinks to Related Information
Well established Canadian or United States agriculture sites are set up to allow you to search their web sites using keywords. These include:
AgFind
http://www.agfind.com/AgroGator
http://agrigator.ifas.ufl.edu/AgriSurf
http://www.agrisurf.com/agrisurfscripts/agrisurf.asp?index=_25,Agriweb from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
http://www.agr.gc.ca/index_e.phtmlCanada Farm Business Management links section
http://www.farmcentre.com/english/links/index.htm
These work in similar fashion to the search engines described earlier, however they search only the information on their web site.
Talking to Friends and Colleagues 
Ask someone else who uses the web. Users often compare notes on various sites and have "discovered" many that are of particular value to producers and other agricultural professionals (e.g., BCMAL Government Directory http://www.dir.gov.bc.ca/).
Subscribing to Topic-Specific Discussion Groups
Another
way of getting information on the web is through discussion groups.
These groups are automated, e-mail based messaging programs that
allow individuals to send messages to all subscribers on the topics
related to a particular group (there are thousands of them). You can
generally subscribe to them by sending an e-mail to a group's
internet address with the words: SUBSCRIBE <name of discussion
group> in the message. Once you subscribe to a group, you will
receive all messages posted by others on that system. A benefit of
these groups is that you can communicate with others interested in
the same topic. Although you can get a lot of "chatter" on
some, you often encounter interesting discussion, questions and
answers along with relevant notices of events and activities.
updated 2005 March
