Teacher's Net
Lesson 5: Instructional Design2, Part One
Search Engines... Advanced Techniques
The Search Engine as a Unique Individual
Search Engines are, basically, a huge database that is placed on one or more servers (like enormous hard drives). To get to the information that it contains, surfers have discovered - and search engines have offered - a set of tips and "languages" which actually help you find the most relevant information in the least amount of time. Since we as teachers are often pressed for time, this is a valuable tool, and one that we're going to briefly become familiar with.
Our first step, though, has nothing to do with "search language" but a lot to do with selection. For instance, say that I'm going to write a paper on an ancestor of mine, President John Adams. I want to include a real, factual family tree that shows my direct descendancy, so I head to the Internet and begin typing in a search engine... which one I use, though, affects what kind of results I'll turn up and how many results I'll find. If I were to use Google.com, a really great search engine with billions of addresses indexed in the database, I might turn up 8,000 or more pages- something that will take hours to go through, and may not offer the results I need. Instead, I might choose to head over to Ancestry.com; this search engine and web site is dedicated to the pursuit of geneology. The number of results I hit are under 20, and out of that 20 at least 5 will rate high in reliability.
Search Engines have their own Unique Identity. Several of the most popular, like Google.com and Yahoo.com, are general-purpose and great for general research. For specifics, though, try beginning with one of those popular search engines to locate an individualized purpose Engine. Using quotes, like "Geneology Search Engine", will take you directly where you need to be.
The "Search Language"
We've already hit on one of the best - and easiest - types of search languages... the "quotes" system. Most search engines will read the "quotes" around a word and return only results that offer every single one of the words contained "within the quotes".
Another key component of the "Search Language" is the actual search words you choose to use. For example, the proper names of people are generally stored in Last Name, First Name format. So, doing a search on myself might return better results if I searched for "Durand Phebe". Other tips Search Word Tips:
-
Do not put commas or periods in with your search words; they are ignored.
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Nonalphanumeric characters: / and - are kept in the text index. All other non-alphabetic and non-numeric characters are ignored.
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Phrases: to search for a phrase of several words, use double quotation marks. For example, "electric transformer" (see, I told you the "quotes" system was useful)
While many search engines are eliminating the need for most search engine languages (for those interested, the most common is called "Boolean", and can be read about by searching for that word), the one final "Search Language" component that I find important to discuss is Logical Operators. Quite simply, it works like this:
-
search for documents with all words.
search for documents with any word.
search for documents with any word. The more words found, the better the score.
exclude documents with specified word. Used only with
and
- Syntax:
word1
word2 word1
word2 word3 ...
- Examples:
cpu
processor market
survey (silane
organopolysiloxane) silicium computer
mainframe
Put It To Use
Using these advanced search ideas, hit this web address http://www.learningspace.org/teach_learn/internet/hunt.html and perform the "Internet Hunt". It won't take but a few minutes, and is well worth the practice using new search techniques and seeing which perform best in what search engines.
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