Week 5 - Using Search Engines

Lecture 4/4/08

When using a search engine, there are three categories that you can search. These are:

1. The free, visible web - this category is made up of public webpages which can be found through search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
2. The free, invisible web - the webpages in this category have free information to the public, however, you need to go directly to these pages to get the information.
3. Paid databases over the web - this category consists of official information such as scholarly journals and newspapers that can be accessed through libraries.
4. We were also taught that there are two types of search tools. Search engines and directories. Search engines include sites such as Google and Yahoo, which enables you to find the sort of information you need, however it finds too many sites that you can look through and it is easy to become overwhelmed. Directories have hand picked sites by editors and only has correct information.

Tutorial

List four strategies that will help structure a good search.

Strategy 1: Google might be the biggest search engine, with 3.3 billion webpages, but using search engines that ask their owners of sites to pay to be indexed, have fewer pages. However, these pages might be more worthwhile to look at because the information might be more accurate.

Strategy 2: When your searching particular information such as a quote in a search engine, you need to make sure that you are using specific punctuation such as quotation marks to enclose the quote. This will prevent you from receiving unrelated links through search engines such as Google.

Strategy 3: Using a search engine can be trouble some, especially when you do not use the key terms for the topic you are after. To get exactly the information you need, you should us as less a word you can in your search and use only key words that will lead you to your topic. For example, if you needed to find 'what causes global warming?', you wouldn't enter that into the Google search, you need to just cut down to the basic 'global warming' and go from there.

Strategy 4: Use the Boolean search technique AND, OR and NOT to help you find information. AND will ensure that you get both of the words that you are searching in a document. OR will get one of either of the words you are searching in a document and Not will search one word and cut out the other.

Internet quiz

Reading Summary

Search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisations service is important for small business websites. To start off with, they check the website which identifies problems that needs to be fixed, such as problems that prevent search engine spider robots finding the site, help correct the site if they are lacking descriptive text and fix navigation problems. They collect keywords (including misspellings) that a person might use when searching your website in a search engine and provide regular reporting and keep checking in so that you are informed of the sites progress and popularity.