Week Five in Accessing Knowledge!

28/3/08

Overview of Lecture Five
This weeks lecture was all about search engines. Search tools fall into two main categories; Search engines and Directories.

• A search engine is a web-based application that crawls the internet, creating indices of websites.
• Some examples of a search engine are Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, AlltheWeb.
• The problem with search engines is that they return too many results and there are limited results that are of relevence.
• Types of queries to do with search engines are keyword, phrase, boolean, advanced/engine features.
• Some search tips when using search engines are: use several search tools, read the search tips or help information at each search engine, use several words for keyword searches, guess a location, select the wheat from the chaff by thinking about what you want, back up to find out where you are and use advanced search functions to narrow down search.
• Directories are human-edited.
• Directories are webpages submitted directories and are reviewed by manual submission.
• Some examples of directories are: DMOZ, Google directory, Yahoo directory, Look smart, About.
  
  Tutorial Activities
  
• The first thing we did for weeks five tutorial, was open up our Blogger page and showed Gary, what we had completed so far.
• After we had shown our Bloggers we then carried on with weeks 5 tutorial activities.

Activity One:

• For activity one, we had to go into the Monash University website and list four strategies that would help structure a good search. (http://www.monash.com/spidap.html)

1. Read the search tips or help information at each search engine.
2. For keyword searches, use minimal words.
3. Use many search engines, not just one- you will get a greater variety.
4. Select the appropriate search type, in many cases you will find relevant information in directories rather than search engines.

Activity Two:

• For activity two we had to go complete a history trivia quiz.
• We had to do this quiz by researching the answers using search engines as the questions came up.
  
  
• After we had completed this quiz we had to printscreen our results. Which is shown below.
  

Activity Three:

Strategies used to locate quiz answers/summary:

• I mostly used Google to find the quiz answers, though i also used dogpile and ask Jeeves.
• I only put in a keyword or a phrase and they were accurate in finding me a result.
• Most of the time, the first link on the search engine would have the right answer.
• When i struggled finding an answer, i would either change search engines or reword it, this usually helped.

Reading Summary:

• Web Search Strategies: This reading follows the exact same structure as the lecture. It includes all the same information but it goes more into depth.
• Search Engine Watch: This page provides a guide to key material within Search Engine Watch, resources across the web and articles written about searching better.
• The History of the Internet: This talks about the beginning of search engines, how we find information on the net, and key pointers of directories, search engines, databases and library catalogues.