Week Five

Lecture Summary

This week the lecture was based around search engines and directories; tools which we use so often these days that it has become important to get to know them and use the right techniques when searching, in order to recieve the best results when we are researching a subject. For us to understand search engines and directory databases in good detail, the lecture described how information is stored and accessed on the web, firstly by splitting the www into three categories: The free visible web, which basically consists of web pages that are for general public viewing, indexed by search engines; the free invisible web, in which the content is only accessible by going directly to the site; and paid databases that provide scholarly articles for academic research, only accessible with a password or on-campus computer. The remaining of the lecture went through describing what exaclty search engines and directories do, the problems associated with search engines, and tips on how to become a good online researcher by using search techniques such as keywords and boolean method.

Tutorial Tasks

Four Useful Search Strategies:

• Decide exaclty what information you are after before you begin searching to determine where you will look for that Information. Use a web directory if you need a wider range of information on a topic, and a search engine if you're after a more specific topic because it is more likely to turn up in the search results.


• Use key words excluding any words that wont help you find our topic. Unless you are searching for a phrase that contains those words, in which case you would enclose the phrase in quotation marks ("") to recieve results of pages with the words in the exact order you typed.


• Narrow or expand your search with Boolean methods such as 'AND' to narrow the results, 'OR' to expand the results, and 'NOT' to avoid irrevelant results.


• Read the Meta tags to see before entering the site, if the words you have searched are in the right context.

Applying Search Strategies

In the task that required us to complete a quiz on http://www.siteseen.co.uk/questions/historytrivia/ to test our online researching skills to find the answers, I used all of the search strategies that i found on http://www.monash.com/spidap.html. The first few questions of the quiz were simple enough to type in keywords into Google's basic search engine, as it came up with relevant results at the top of the list. Another simple way i found the answers was by substituting the options (possible answers) into the question, E.g. For te question, "On which of these did work first commence in 1859?" i tested the option 'the Suez Canal' and rephrased the question into an answer and typed, "Work on the Suez Canal first commenced in 1859". However, as the questions progressed and became more complex, they became harder to find since typing in only key words would not get me what I was after since the key words would be too far apart from each other on the web pages listed by the search engine. So i used quotation marks to surround phrases and expanded but also expanded my search by using 'OR'.

This is the screen shot of my result on the Quiz.

Reading Summaries