Searching the Web

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Searching the Web

• Educational Technology 286

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The Internet

• What is the Internet
• A world-wide system of computer networks
• Not owned by anyone organization
• Developed to computers at different research
  organizations talk to each other
• conceived by the Advanced Research Projects
  Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. government in 1969
• Who uses it http//www.internetworldstats.com/stat
  s.htm

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World Wide Web

• Just one part of the Internet
• browsers

Internet
FTP
Blogs
IM
E-Mail
World Wide Web
Listservs
Wikis
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World Wide Web

• All the resources and users on the Internet using
  Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http).

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Search Tools

• Search Directories
• Search Engines
• Multi-threaded or meta-search engines

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Search Directories

• LookSmart (http//www.looksmart.com)
• Yahoo (http//www.yahoo.com)
• Open Directory (http//dmoz.org)
• Uncover the Net (http//www.uncoverthenet.com/)
• Complete Planet
• Directories for children
• Ask Jeeves for Kids (http//www.ajkids.com/)
• Yahooligans (http//www.yahooligans.com)
• KidsClick (http//sunsite.berkeley.edu/KidsClick!/
  ) (http//www.kidsclick.org/ksearch.html)

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Search Directories

• Advantages
• Relevance
• Less hits
• Disadvantages
• Edited
• Dead links (may partner with search engines)

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Search Engines

• AltaVista (http//www.altavista.com)
• Google (http//www.google.com)
• Alltheweb (http//www.alltheweb.com)
• Excite (http//www.excite.com)
• HotBot (http//hotbot.lycos.com)

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Multi-threaded Search Engines

• Dogpile (http//www.dogpile.com)
• Metacrawler (http//www.metacrawler.com)

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Search Engines

• For children
• Family Friendly Search http//www.familyfriendlyse
  arch.com/
• Subject specific
• http//www.beaucoup.com/

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Search Engines

• Advantages
• More hits
• Disadvantages
• Less relevance
• Rankings may be bias
• Getting listed does not mean rank well
• Rank depends on
• Payment If pay, may list faster
• Number of clicks
• What software believes most relevant
• Location of keywords

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Search Tools Results

• Directory results influenced by editors
• May use search engines as backup
• Engine results influenced by
• Advertisers
• Payment for placement
• Placement of terms on page
• Frequency of terms on page
• Popularity of page

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Search Tool Comparisons

• Size (how many pages indexed)
• Interface (easy to use?)
• Features
• Results lists (how results are presented)

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Search Strategies

• Form your Question
• Identify important concepts
• Identify search terms
• Consider synonyms
• Boolean Operators
• AND, OR, NOT
• http//www.internettutorials.net/boolean.html
• How to choose a search engine or directory
• http//www.internettutorials.net/choose.html
• Proximal locators
• NEAR, FOLLOWED BY

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Search Tips

• Control-F
• Bookmarks
• URLs

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Strategies

• Search engines allow you to use
• Fuzzy logic
• Allow for misspellings
• Proximity
• Returns results on keywords close together
• Stemming
• Finds other variations on root
• Thesaurus
• Finds similar words and phrases
• Concept searching
• Returns pages with similar concepts, grouped
  logically by statistics

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Evaluating Web Sources

• Examine the URL
• Uniform Resource Locator
• http//www.udel.edu/index.html

File name
Server name
Domain name
Protocol
Domain List http//www.norid.no/domenenavnbaser/do
mreg.html
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Evaluating Web Sources

• Accuracy
• Authority
• Objectivity
• Coverage
• Currency
• http//www.vuw.ac.nz/staff/alastair_smith/evaln/ev
  aln.htm
• http//school.discovery.com/schrockguide/eval.html
  

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Evaluating Web Sources

• White House
• www.whitehouse.gov
• www.whitehouse.net
• The Onion
• http//www.theonion.com/content/
• Martin Luther King
• http//nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1964/king-bi
  o.html

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Citing Web Resources

• Columbia University Press
• http//www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/cgos/idx_basic.html
  
• The English Pages
• http//www.abacon.com/compsite/resources/citation.
  html

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For Future Reference.Searching in the Classroom

• Scavenger Hunts http//www.aea14.k12.ia.us/technol
  ogy/ScavengerHunt.html
• Web Quests - A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented
  activity in which some or all of the information
  that learners interact with comes from resources
  on the internet.
• http//webquest.sdsu.edu/