<p>With the abundance of information available online, it is important to understand how students search for and use the internet for their courses. Though much is known about general internet search strategies, less is known about how students use the internet for disciplinary coursework. This study aimed to characterize the search strategies students use to find information on the internet to help answer open-ended homework questions. Using observations along with a think-aloud protocol, 25 undergraduate biology students were tasked with answering biology questions of varying complexity to determine how they used the internet and if their use depended on question type. Results indicated that students searched for information in highly recursive ways, shifting in a non-linear fashion between thinking about the problem, performing a search, evaluating search results, and developing an answer. We also found that students tended to rely heavily on curated search engine suggestions and results and that students exhibited only subtle differences in how they sought information for factual versus abstract question types. These findings help expand existing frameworks to include a broader range of behaviors that students employ when using search engines to answer discipline-based questions. This study also provides information that instructors can leverage to help students use the internet as a resource to support their learning, such as by developing structured reflections or by modeling productive information-seeking behaviors.</p>