Slide 1

Searching The Internet Practical Strategies Slide 2 URLs Look at the URL to determine what type of organization produced the site..com is a commercial site..edu is an academic site..gov is a government site..org is usually a non-profit organization..net is a network service provider..mil is a military site. What domain name is used to indicate a Korean Company? Slide 3 And More URLs If you found a page on phrasal verbs, called phrasals.htm within the grammar section of a site called www.studenthelp.com can you suggest what the full URL might be? www.studenthelp.com/grammar/phrasals.htm How can awareness of the URL structure be useful... When evaluating websites? When dealing with broken links? Slide 4 Examples of Search Engines Google http://www.google.comttp://www.google.com Northern Light http://www.northernlight.comttp://www.northernlight.com Lycos http://www.lycos.comhttp://www.lycos.com Microsoft http://www.msn.comhttp://www.msn.com Altavista http://www.altavista.comhttp://www.altavista.com Slide 5 Three Principles of Searching the Web Search Engines (key words) Subject Directories Natural Language Search pages Slide 6 Using Search Engines (by key word) Refine your search by using specific key words e.g. Sydney Opera House Boolean Operators AND (+), OR, NOT (-) Punctuation e.g. biography of Marilyn Monroe Slide 7 Subject Directories Search directories are categorised with information classified by topic and subject. Good for searching broad subject areas. Category headings sometimes as useful as actual hits. Examples: www.yahoo.com www.excite.com Slide 8 Meta-search Engines These simultaneously search multiple search engines. They are also referred to as parallel search engines, multi-threaded search engines, or mega search engines. These are useful when: you have an obscure topic you are not having luck finding anything when you search your search is not complex you want to retrieve a relatively small number of relevant results Examples: Dogpile http://www.dogpile.com/index.gsphttp://www.dogpile.com/index.gsp Metacrawler http://www.metacrawler.com/index.htmlhttp://www.metacrawler.com/index.html Slide 9 Natural Language Engines This type of search engine encourages you to ask properly phrased questions. e.g. How much does a Toshiba laptop cost? Useful for people without much search experience Tries to clarify your query with question and answer interaction Performs a meta search and returns results in friendly format Example: Ask Jeeves http://www.askjeeves.comhttp://www.askjeeves.com