Week 9

Lecture: This week we learned about using Search Engines. The overview contained: Search Tool Types and Search Engines - intro, problems, interface, common search engines, types of queries and search tips. First there are 2 main categories for search tools, which are Search engines and directories. Search Engines are web-based applications that looks through the Internet to find as many websites on the typed in subject it can find, and display them in a list from were you can choose. Examples of Search Engines are Google.com, yahoo.com, altavista.com etc. Some problems that can be is sometimes you can get too many results when using these search engines, which will give results of websites that have nothing to do with the desired subject except for maybe half of the word typed in to be searched. The search engine interface is the different pieces of info that can be used with the search engine like: similar pages, whether the site is cached or not, website address and result. When typing in a query use only keywords or phrases and maybe use advanced engine features.

Workshop: There were 3 tasks to do in this weeks workshop which are: 1. Go into monash website and list 4 strategies that will help structure a good search, 2. Complete online quiz from siteseen website, and 3. Discuss some of the strategies used.

1. My 4 strategies are Authenticity, the bias, currency and authorship.

2. Unfortunately I could not get the website (http://www.siteseen.co.uk/questions/generalknowledgehard/) to come up, the search engine keeps coming up www.siteseer.co.uk.

3. With authenticity - it is about seeing if the website is actually authentic, has correct info.
Bias - to see if the info given to us from a website is biased towards or against the subject in question.
Currency - to see if the info given to us is current (10years or less) or if the info is historic or not.
Authorship - is to see if there is any authors names, dates, place of origin and authors past history.

Readings: The first piece of reading is about all what we learned in the lecture. The second piece of reading is about the different types of strategies we can use to get around and use different search engines. The third is about search engine watch, which would not open for me to have a look at. The last piece of reading is on the history of the Internet and search engines.