Scraps to More Search?

The answer to that depends on what you're trying to do with your search. Your research my lead to some kind of offline endeavor—contacting a support group, buying a program, getting a new job, moving to a new city. Or your research may lead you to narrow your focus to just one thing—you may want to search for information on one specific cancer drug instead of a certain kind of cancer.

In that case you pull out what you need—the name of the drug, the place to which you'd like to relocate, the job title you want to get more information on—and go on with your research, striking out in that new direction.

You may want to keep going in the direction you started—more information on a history of a country, or a movement in art history, or a particular species of dinosaur. In that case I would periodically narrow my pile of scraps, taking the best information and writing an informal report, and discarding the rest.

You should also let the scraps adjust your search. I wish I could say “do this, then do that, then take your scraps and do the other,” but I can't. Unfortunately things are not that linear when you're doing online research. Any category of research can develop dozens if not hundreds of lines of inquiry (as I have discovered, to my chagrin, over and over again). The best I can tell you is that if you organize the materials you find initially, it'll be easier for you to delineate categories of searches that you might want to pursue later. Don't try to do everything at once; follow one thread at a time.

I do want to address something that might come up for you no matter where you decide to search: the idea of letting your scraps simmer.