EDT 251

October 22, 2009

Where do you go?

Are you happy with the results?

What do you think makes the searching

experience work well?

Google – 65%

Yahoo! – 19%

Bing – 9%

Ask.com – 2% and Ask Kids

Ixquick

Clusty

Librarians’ Internet Index

Google Directory

http://infopeople.org/search/chart.html

Search engines use software (“robots” or “spiders”) to index some amount of Web pages• Proprietary algorithms

• Google claims over a trillion URLs searched

• Paid placement of ads provides revenue

• Currency – how frequently do they add sites?

Other tools add human-collected or human-submitted sites (Google and Yahoo directories)• These are then searched by subject or keyword

• Tend to be smaller in size

Relevance ranking of results

AKA the “Deep Web”

Resources that are not indexed by search

engines (such as library databases)

InfoMINE – indexes free-standing

databases

Add term “database” to your topic in

Google or Yahoo

Scholarly information subset of Google:

http://scholar.google.com

Many journal articles included on publisher’s web sites

Set up “Scholar Preferences” Library Links enter

“OhioLINK” and click to check the box

Look for “Find it with OLinks” or “OhioLINK OLinks”

links in results

Online encyclopedia of over 3 million

articles

Built using a wiki – allows for multiple

contributors

How does it work?

What are the cautions?

1. Identify the important concepts

2. Choose keywords

3. Pick synonyms and related terms

4. Think about using quotes, truncation, Boolean

5. Choose a search engine

6. Read the instructions (most rules are the same, but not all)

7. Enter your search expression

8. Evaluate the results

9. Modify/narrow your search (if needed)

10. Move to a new search engine (if needed)

Crucial because of fluidity/lack of standards

Some possible criteria for any source:

• Who wrote or created the source?

• What audience was the source written for?

• Where did you (or can you) find the source?

• When was the source written or created?

• Why was the source written?

• How can you verify the information contained in the source?

Look carefully at URL (.com, .edu, etc.)