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Searching for information
Task 1
Definitions
1. In pairs, try to write a definition for the following terms:
Web browser
Search engine
URL
Keywords
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2. Now get together with another pair and try to improve your definitions:
Web browser
Search engine
URL
Keywords
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Task 2
Reduce it: Search Engines
Read the following information which has been taken from the video which you
have just watched:
When you want to search for information you are not searching the web, you are
searching the search engine’s index of the web. In order to create this index,
special software often referred to as ‘spiders’ is used. Spiders start by searching
a few web pages. They follow all of the links on those pages and then search
the pages they point to. They then follow all of the links on those pages and so
on until they have indexed all of the web pages they can find.
When you want to search for something you usually enter your search term or
keywords. The search engine software searches its index to find every page
which includes the search terms you have entered. There could be hundreds of
thousands of results.
How does the search engine know which documents or links to show to you first?
The search engine asks more than 200 questions such as ‘how many times does
this page contain your keywords?’, ‘do the words appear in the title, in the
URL?’, ‘does the page include synonyms for those words?’, ‘Is this page from a
quality website or low quality/spam site?’, ‘what is its page rank?’. (Page Rank
is a formula which rates a web page’s importance by looking at how many
outside links point to it and how important those links are). All of the answers
from these questions are combined together to form an overall score. The pages
with the highest overall score are placed first in your list of search results.
All of this complex searching and ranking takes approximately half a second.
Table 1 – write down the 12 most important words in the text above
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Table 2 – Reduce these to the 6 most important words
Table 3 – Reduce these to the 3 most important words
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Task 3
Search Results Page
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Task 4
Searching URLs
a)Before using the internet, look at the following URL:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk
From the URL write down as much information as you can find.
b) Before looking at the site, do you feel you could trust the content?
Yes No
Why do you think you might be able to trust this site?
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c) In a web browser type in the URL: http://www.legislation.gov.uk
Have a quick look at the site.
Write a sentence explaining how accurate your original observations were.
Before using the internet, look at the following URL: http://www.cqu.edu.au
From the URL write down as much information as you can find.
b) Before looking at the site, do you feel you could trust the content?
Yes No
Why do you think you might be able to trust this site?
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c) In a web browser type in the URL: http://www.cqu.edu.au
Have a quick look at the site.
Write a sentence explaining how accurate your original observations were.
Before using the internet, look at the following URL: http://www.aliens-exist.net
From the URL write down as much information as you can find.
b) Before looking at the site, do you feel you could trust the content?
Yes No
Why do you think you might be able to trust or not trust this site?
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c) In a web browser type in the URL: http://www.aliens-exist.net
Have a quick look at the site.
Write a sentence explaining how accurate your original observations were.
Find at least two other examples of URLs that tell you a lot about the site before
you even look at it. Make notes about what you have found out and why you
think they are trustworthy or not
URL1:
Notes:
URL2:
Notes:
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Task 5
Searching for information: adverts
Using a search engine, type in the following search term: modern art
a. What were the top two sites about in the main search results area?
b. What were the top two sites about in the advertising results area?
c. Which of the two sections would you find most useful if you were writing an
essay about modern art?
d. Which of the two sections would you find the most useful if you wanted to
purchase some modern art for your bedroom?
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Using a search engine, type in the following search term: mothers day
Most of the time you won’t get any adverts displayed for this term.
a. Think about how you could change your search term so that you can see
adverts about gifts that you could purchase for mothers day.
New mothers day search term:
b. Did you get any adverts for this new search term? Yes
c. Would these adverts have been useful to you?
Yes
No
No
d. Try a different search term for mothers day gifts and see if you can get
different adverts to display.
New mothers day search term:
e. Did you get any adverts for this new search term? Yes
f. Would these adverts have been useful to you?
Now type in a search term of your own choice
a. Search term used:
Yes
No
No
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b. What were the top two sites about in the main search results area?
c. What were the top two sites about in the advertising results area?
d. Which of the two sections do you think was the most useful at providing
information for your specific search term?
e. Explain your answer to question d
EXTENSION TASK
Try to amend your search term to get different advertising results
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Task 6
Using a search engine – put in the first 10 answers you get for the following
question:
How far away is the Moon from the Earth?
Answer 1:
Answer 2:
Answer 3:
Answer 4:
Answer 5:
Answer 6:
Answer 7:
Answer 8:
Answer 9:
Answer 10:
Why do you think the answers might be different?
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How can you be sure that you have found the correct answer?
Task 7
Search engines – an investigation.
Results
First result
Second
result
Third result
Fourth
result
Fifth result
www.google.com
www.ask.com
www.dogpile.com
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Task 8
Effective Searching (1)
1. You have to research information about the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Write down two search terms that you might use.
1.
2.
2. Now log onto your computer and use a search engine to try out your two
search terms.
Search term 1
a. Number of results obtained ..................................
b. Top three websites in your search results:
Website URL
1.
2.
3.
Mark out of 10 for usefulness (10
being excellent, 1 being no use)
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Search term 2
a. Number of results obtained ..................................
b. Top three websites in your search results:
Website URL
Mark out of 10 for usefulness (10
being excellent, 1 being no use)
1.
2.
3.
Task 9
Effective Searching (2)
1a. You have to research information about the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Write down one of the original search terms that you used in the previous
exercise.
Earlier search term:
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1b. Now try to improve the search term by using the Boolean operators AND, OR
and NOT
Improved search term:
2. Now log onto your computer and use the improved search term.
a. Number of results obtained ..................................
b. Top three websites in your search results:
Website URL
1.
2.
3.
Mark out of 10 for usefulness (10
being excellent, 1 being no use)
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3. How does your improved search term compare with your original search
term?
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Task 10
Place a screen shot of your advanced image search below
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How effective where the results – was the information useful?
Fill in the table below about Royalty free images.
Chosen Topic:
Name of image
Where found
Thumbnail