Lesson 1: Search Engines
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I have a suspicion that several teachers here in Pettus feel a little overwhelmed or “out of the loop” when it comes to using search engines in their classrooms. I included myself in that category until I completed this tutorial. I am now confident that I will be able to help kids search their little hearts out using free online search engines due to the tips and tricks I learned in this tutorial experience.
Last year, there were times when teachers would send kids to the library with a pass to use the computers for research purposes. Nine times out of ten, the student would sit down, type in www.google.com and start searching away, many times leaving frustrated, with either too little, or way too much information. I will admit that I wasn’t much help in this area either, because even though I was learning different ways to find information online, I wasn’t comfortable enough to offer suggestions to others, outside of what I knew how to do, which in all honesty wasn’t much more than what my students knew. Hopefully, after going through this section, you will be more comfortable and knowledgeable about search engines as well. If not, you are always welcome to come visit me in the library and I’ll walk you through things until you feel better.
Before going into the different types of search engines, it’s important to understand just exactly what a search engine is. Basically a search engine is a tool that is used to quickly access literally millions of files containing webpage content. It is a huge database of internet files that have been put together by a computer and can be easily accessed. (Once you know how to search—ah, there’s the rub!)
There are two basic types of search engines.
First, individual search engines, such as
Ask, put together their own searchable databases. Second is the
Basically a search engine works by searching web pages for key words that you supply. So, you type in a key word or phrase, hit “search” and the search engine will give you a list of web pages that contain the word or phrase you supplied. Sounds easy, right? Then why is it so hard to find information in search engines? Well, there are several reasons for this, but the main one resides in the fact that there is just such a vast amount of information out there in cyber-land. You have to know how to find your way around, or it’s like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack
Different search engines might have some similarities, but no two are going to render the exact same search results. If you search the same term on several different search engines, you are going to get a different list of sites from each one. There may be up to a forty to sixty percent overlap of sites, but no two lists will be identical. The goal of each search engine site is to list the results of a search into some kind of relevant order so the most useful, relevant sites appear at the top of the list. Among one of many ways they do this by looking at the frequency of the key word throughout the site as well as in the title. Different search engines use different criteria for ranking, which is what causes the variation in search results.
An interesting thing that I learned in this chapter was that the information you find through a search engine might sometimes be dated. I had always heard, and I guess just assumed that if I found something by searching for it through a search engine, then it was up to date. However, search engines capture information in a fixed index that is updated periodically. How often each individual search engine updates its index has large bearing on how current the information is. (Most search engines, however, do partner with news databases, and have links to their sites, which are updated frequently.)
Tip: When searching, put quotation marks around your search terms to return a shorter list of sites. For example, go to Google and type in Texas Panhandle, then hit search. Next, type in "Texas Panhandle" with parenthesis, and hit search. You should notice a dramatic drop in the number of hits that come up.
Lesson 1 Search Engines Lesson 2 Metasearch Engines Lesson 3 Subdirectories Lesson 4 Library Gateways
Lesson 5 Evaluating WebPages Lesson 6 Creating a Search Strategy Lesson 7 Basic Search Tips
Lesson 8 Boolean Logic Lesson 9 Field Searching Lesson 10 Troubleshooting Lesson 11 Clusty Search Engine
Chapter 12 All Things Google Lesson 13 All Things Yahoo