Week 5 - Using Search Engines 28 March 2008

Lecture:

Today in lecture we have covered two types of search tools. search engine and directories.Search engine which is a program that crawls the Internet creating indices of web-site. example is www.google.com and www.yahoo.com.The problem with search engine is that they return too many results with limited relevance to the the topic. Users can manipulate the ranking of the page resulting the computer to store too much indices which are irrelevant to the topic and out-dated.





Tutorial:

In class we were asked to look at this website http://www.monash.com/spidap.html and to go through the website and list four strategies that will help us stucture a good search which are;

List four strategies that will help you to structure a good search?
1) know where to look for.
Don't search a web page that's is meant for business dealing for things concerning health.
2) fine tune your keywords
Be specific to what you are looking for
; if you want to buy a car, don't type a car, be specific and type what brand you looking for
3) search in a form of a query.
type the question you have other than some of it.
4) Anticipate the answer
type some-thing that you expect to find.

The one strategy i used to find the above strategies was by reading through each page provided of the site http://www.monash.com/spidap.html and gain different ways to best structure a search. I founded effective due to the fact that i was able to gain knowledge of extra information about using search engines that i have not known even as searching for these strategies.



The next task was to look at this website http://www.siteseen.co.uk/questions/historytrivia/ on this website there was alot of weird questions that i have never came across, most of them i have gueesed it and it was pretty good it was all rite for the ones i have got it wrong it was simply i only had to go back to the question and pick any of the asnwers again till i got it right.













URL Readings:

1.The History of the Internet: Search Engines

http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/history/ivh/chap4.htm
This site discusses about the history of search engines.
*Early search-engines had a spider
*built up databases either of directories or web-pages or
*built-up directories (specifically limited in ambition and range, but supposedly limited to better sites) and
*they could also rank by terms within a document.



To have a better search, the author suggest

Be specific to the question and therefore type the whole question. an example is by typing "history" you will get what every history your can get access to. But by typing "history of Somalia" you will definitely get most of the result associated with Somalia.


Therefore try to out-smart the computer by guessing what sort of answer you wish to get and feed it with the hint.


2.Web Search Strategies.
http://www.virtualsalt.com/howlook.htm.

the author discusses how to have a better Internet Search Tips and Strategies. the site also contains a description of the information found on a web-site. There are basically three categories of information on the Web.

-The Free, Visible Web. This category includes all the publicly mounted Web pages.

-The Free, Invisible Web. This category includes the contents of sites that provide their articles or information free to users.

-Paid Databases over the Web. This category includes commercial databases that libraries subscribe to, containing scholarly journals and newspapers.


3. The last one was http://myecu.ecu.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_154713_1%26url%3D


it basically talks about Search engines Optimisation, they also talking about the majority of small business web sites they analyze, they use design components that are incompatible with search engine spider robots. They dot points some things that they can use as for keyword analysis, setting your benchmark, measuring your progress etc. They then explain why you should use this things is that they offer flexibility and choice based on YOUR current needs and search engine optimisation budget.