How to use a search engine

Sean Pearson

Modeled after a presentation entitled “Locating Web-Based Educational Resources” by Paul Barron that was presented at the VSTE 2003

conference.

Copies may be made for education use only.

Please note that the numbers provided are the number of pages found when I created this presentation and are provided as a guide. Your exact number

will vary.

This presentation will focus on Altavista.

Some thoughts... For teachers to be able to keep up with the

important influence that technology is having on their students they need to be able to adapt their teaching styles.

Incorporating technology into the classroom at the lower grade levels helps students and teachers succeed.

Students need to know about the wealth of information found on the Internet and students need to learn how to find what is based in fact and what they can skip.

An Interesting Fact

“94% of teens use the Internet to do research for school; 71% relied mostly on Internet sources for the last big school project.”

The Internet and Education: Findings of the

Pew Internet and American Life Project

http://www.pewinternet.org

Teachers need to become comfortable with the Internet and its advantages.

“Most people use a search engine by simply typing a few words into the query box and then scrolling through whatever comes up. Sometimes their choice of words ends up narrowing the search unduly and causing them not to find what they're looking for. More often the end result of the search is a haystack of off-target webpages that must be combed through.”

Four NETS for Better Searching

http://webquest.sdsu.edu/searching/fournets.htm

Domains:

.com Commercial .edu Education .gov Government .mil Military

.org Organization .us, .uk, .fr Countries .net network .k12.va.us VA Schools

Things to think about when weeding through the results:

Students should be instructed to read commercial sites thoroughly before using information from them. Since the site is trying to sell you something chances are the people are presenting their own opinion on the matter.

For the most part educational and government sites can be trusted as people who maintain these have done their research.

Organizational sites may present their own opinions but usually back it with data.

Operators

Before we use a search engine one must know how to use the operators

for the search.

AND Boolean Operator (Standard)

AND - If you put AND in between two search terms that means a document must have both to be returned. This is an inclusive search.

Virginia Hampton

Both Virginia and Hampton

OR Boolean Operator (Standard)

OR - One or more of terms can be in the documents. This is a less exclusive search.

Virginia HamptonOR

NOT Boolean Operator (Standard)

NOT - Anything listed after NOT must not be in the search document. This is the most exclusive.

Altavista uses AND NOT instead of NOT

HamptonVirginia

NOT

NEAR Proximity Operator (Altavista)

NEAR - The terms must appear within ten words of each other in the document.

Virginia Hampton

NEAR

Time to start searching

Go to Altavista

http://www.altavista.com/web/adv

This is the advanced search page for Altavista.

Type your searches in here:

“Phrase Searching”

Search for“lesson plans.”

Using the AND Operator

AND - Finds documents that have all search terms in it.

Lets find lesson plans that have both “lesson plans” and Greece in them.– “lesson plans” AND Greece

Using the AND Operator

Notice how it dropped from 641,000 documents to 10,689.

Using the AND NOT Operator

AND NOT finds documents that do not have the specified terms in it.

Lets find lesson plans that do not mention Rome:– “lesson plans” AND Greece AND NOT Rome

Using the AND NOT Operator

This took our search down to 5,386

Using the Near Operator

The NEAR operator finds phrases that are within 10 words of each other.

Find lessons plans near the word Greece:– “lesson plans” NEAR Greece

Using the NEAR Operator

Notice how we dropped from 5000 to only 600.

Wait that’s not all you can do

Title SearchesSorted SearchesURL Limiter

Domain LimiterLink Checker

TITLES

You can use title: to find webpages that have the specified terms in the title.

title: with AND

Let find lesson plans that have Greece in the title:– title:Greece AND “lesson plans”

No space

title: with AND

This search found 303 results.

title: with NEAR

Lets find webpages that have Greece in the title and NEAR “lesson plans”:– title:Geece NEAR “lesson plans”

title: with NEAR

This search found 200 results. Remember we started with more than 600,000.

Sorting

You can sort the pages based on many things. Lets sort the last search.

Sort by domain:edu

Sorting

We have the same 200 sites but now all the education sites are listed first.

URL Limiter

You limit to a certain URL. Lets limit to just VA sites. Put the URL limiter last.– Greece AND "lesson plans" AND url:k12.va.us

No space

URL Limiter

This found 69 sites made by Virginia teachers which means they should be aligned to the SoLs.

Domain Limiter

Lets see what the educational sites have on them:– Greece NEAR "lesson plans" AND domain:edu

No space

Domain Limiter

This search found 79 educational sites.

Link Checking

Suppose you found a webpage and wanted to know what pages link to them.

Lets see who is linked to Bassette homepage.– link:www.sbo.hampton.k12.va.us/Elementary/bassette/

index.htmlNo space

Link Checking

There are five webpages linked to this webpage.

Explore the world of Kartoo

Image Searching

http://www.picsearch.com

Seach for sound files

http://www.findsounds.com

To learn about Google

http://webquest.sdsu.edu/searching/fournets.htm

For more advanced stuff besides just webpages

http://ozline.com/learning/theory.html