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This Week's Topic Search Engines Learn to efficiently find information using search engines. Manage your time online and increase the accuracy of your searches. This week we will discuss various techniques for effectively using search engines. (See the search engine cheat sheet in the Download Depot.) This Week's Tips Manage Your Online Time (Monday) Proactively manage your time spent collecting online materials. Spend enough time to realistically determine how long it will take for you and your students to complete a specific Web activity. The following tips should prove helpful: Search with a specific topic in mind. Schedule your online time, just like an appointment. Bookmark pages for future reference, especially Web pages containing relevant links to your topic.
Narrow vs. Broad Online Searching (Tuesday) Depending on the nature of your information, search broadly or narrowly. Remember that most search engines organize Web pages into categories. Here are some examples. Broad search: For civil war uniforms you may want to search for "civil war" and then search for "uniforms, "within the appropriate civil war category. Narrow search: If you are looking for information about Abraham Lincoln, it’s probably better to search for "Abraham Lincoln" than for "American presidents." Customize Your Online Search (Wednesday) When using a search engine, customize your query to increase accuracy. To include or exclude specific words, use the following symbols in the search engine query: Adding a "+" in between two words requires the two words to be found in all of the search results. (e.g., “nightgowns +flannel”). Adding a "–" in front of a word requires that the word not be found in any of the search results. (e.g., “iron –maiden”). Note the space between the first word and the symbol/second word combination. Restrict Your Online Search (Thursday) To find relevant Web sites, restrict your search to a particular segment of Web documents. In some search engines, attaching one of the following operators to the front of a search word restricts the search to a specific section of the document. "t": will restrict searches to document titles only. "u": will restrict searches to document URLs only. (To use these operators, enter both the letter and a colon before your search word.) Other search engines allow you to select parameters for your searches (e.g., Web sites, Web pages, news, research documents). Searching for Different Types of Files (Friday) Certain search engines have provided queries expressly designed for finding different types of files (e.g., image, audio, etc.). For example, Google allows you to select language or image. HotBot allows you to select images, video, MP3/audio, or languages. Alta Vista allows you to select images, video, MP3/audio, or languages. Webseek (http://www.ctr.columbia.edu/webseek/) allows you to select images, color photos, videos, gray images, or graphics. Checkout the cheat sheet handout in the Download Depot for more search engine characteristics. |
