Internet Searching

Skills

Internet

• No quality control

• Constantly changing

• Use general strategies

Subject Directories

• Organized by subject or topic

• Examples: www.about.com www.lii.org

• Yahoo! Is supported by paid advertising and if no results are found it will then automatically search in Alta Vista.

Search Engines

• Search the web for a certain word or phrase

• Each search engine is slightly different

• Try different ones…

www.dogpile.comwww.hotbot.com

www.metacrawler.com

• Used the most

• Effective

• Dependable

• Identifies paid sponsors’ links

Google

• Allows quotation marks "working mothers"

• Easy to use tabs news, images....

• Advance searching and spelling fixes

Google

Ability restrict to specific sites & file types

"windows XP" site:microsoft.com

"chemical fires" filetype:ppt

Google

Searching Strategies

• Become familiar with the topic

• Choose search terms

• Select subject directory or search

engine

• Use advanced searching techniques

• Limit search by language, date etc…

• Try and guess possible web

addresses

Boolean Operators

• AND, OR and NOT

• Should be in upper case

• Use the “( )” to list the order of operations

AND or “+”

Retrieve sites that have both search terms

Does not mean that the terms are together

OR

Retrieve sites that contain one or both words

Used to connect synonyms

NOT or “-”

Retrieve the web sites that may not contain the word you specified

Advanced Boolean Operators

• "Near" search for words within 10-25 of each other Example: sheep NEAR/10 dip

• "ADJ" searches for words that are right next to each other but in any order

Advanced Boolean Operators

• "FAR" searches for words that are more than 25 away from each other

• "BEFORE" works like "AND", except that the terms must follow the specified order.

Ranking and Relevance

• Most relevant pages are listed first

• Number of times the terms appear

• Location of those words

• How many link to that site?

Evaluating Web Pages

• What does the web address tell you?

• Is it objective?

• Look at the web address carefully

~, %, members

edu, gov, org, com, ca

Evaluating Web Pages

• Look for author information and date. If there is no information present on the site one can e-mail the author.

• When was the information last updated. Undated factual information is no better than anonymous information.

Evaluating Web Pages

• Look for quality information such as footnotes, links, altered information and well chosen resources

• What do others say about this site? One can look up the author in Google, as well as, search the web site and find out who owns it.

use alexa.com or link:URL in Google

Evaluating Web Pages

• Does it all add up?

• Why was the web site created?

• Does it make sense or is it a parody?

• Is it the best resource for my project?

• If you are unsure of the web site feel free to ask

your teacher or a librarian.

Why Evaluate?

• Cheap or free to put information on the net

• Need to tell the difference between good and bad sources of information

• Need to evaluate the information you find

Google Books

• books.google.com

• Material is supplied by publishers, authors and universities

• Mostly books but some articles are included

• For more information:

print.google.com/googleprint/about.html

Deep Web, a.k.a. “Invisible Web”

• There is an invisible web you cannot see

• Most of the deep web is made up of • specialized databases

• Use databases and Google Scholar to find this information

scholar.google.com

Reminders

www.stuartmacphersonlibrary.ca/WEB-LINKS

www.plamondonlibrary.ab.ca/Web-Links

Remember to cite your sources!

Bibliography

http://library.loyno.edu/pubs/research/search_web.HTM#intro

http://www.geekgirls.com/net_search_engines.htm

http://www.geekgirls.com/net_google.htm

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html

http://gateway.lib.ohio-state.edu/tutor/les4/index.html

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/

google_print_scholar.pdf

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html

http://gateway.lib.ohio-state.edu/tutor/les4/index.html

http://answers.com