Part 1. What is Search on the Web?

What does the web look like?

Spider Web

The most common image of the World Wide Web is a spider web, with interconnecting pages of content. This is not very accurate. The Web is much more chaotic and disorganized. 

 

Bow tie 

A bow tie is a better metaphor. There is a Core of central pages that are indexed by all the main search engines. These are most often used as starting points for web searches and for final content by most users. Origination pages point toward the Core, but are not very well known, so not many people go there. They need to get recognized. Termination pages usually contain content, but rarely point back to the Core. 

Look at the following 3 pages. Decide which are Core, Origination and Termination pages.

About.com Encyclopedia

The Hunger Site

ComputerShopper

Which category do search engines belong to?

Search vs. Browse

What’s your question?

Interview yourself for key words and concepts

When starting a search, the best thing to do is act as your own devil's advocate. Try to find key words that point to your topic but aren't too broad (it is hard to get too specific on the web any more). The first question you need to ask yourself, "Do I know what I am looking for?"

Do you know what you are looking for? 

It is OK if you are not quite sure what the topic of your serch is going to be. Many of my students start out this way. It is like going into a bookstore. Sometimes you are just "browsing" or looking for a good techno-thriller novel, for example. Any author or publisher are OK. Other times, you walk right up to the clerk and say, "I want Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six." This is searching. 

Altavista (search engines) Best for searching.

Yahoo (subject directories) Best for browsing.

Note that generally with browsing, you are broadening your topic area, and with serachin you are narrowing it.

Activity 1:  Pick out a topic that you are unfamiliar with (pet grooming, horse racing, South Beach Miami or pancake syrup) and see how fast you can get results from both the search engines above.

Difference between searchers

NS and NNS

The leg up problem with NNS

Non-native searchers tend to have a chicken-and-egg problem with key words. Indeed, I would too with an unfamiliar topic, such as nuclear physics. The best way to start with that is use a subject directory first, to find key words, then go to a search engine.

Finding jargon

So may topics today have their own jargon. Learning jargon is best done in an encyclopedia, which gives a concise overview. There are many of these on line.

Academic vs Business

Academic users tend to spend more time searching, and do not require immediate results. They are looking for in-depth material. Our students, non-native speakers, may actually follow a pattern closer to that of business users, that want information quickly, without too many "encumbering" details.

Quick and Dirty vs detailed

The amount of detail you are looking for will affect your search style. Some engines dredge up everything. Most try to put it into some kind of order for relevance (some even have ratings for relevance). You have to decide how many "hits" you are gong to try when you get the results.

Difference between Search Engines

Google uses Artificial Intelligence to guess what you want.

Besides Altavista and Yahoo, there are many other search engines.We will deal with some of these later. But I just wanted to point out my favorite, the one that is fast and consistently returns the best hits for most of my kind of reserach (academic).

Excite offers alternate searches.

I used to like Excite before Google (with Hotbot thrown in three for a brief period). Excite gave you a list of hits, but also offered related subhject headings. This is very helpful for my students, who sometimes lack the energy to plow through an entire encyclopedia article to collect key words.

Activity 2: Think of a topic you want to arrive at (Ghandi, for example), then think of a related topic (non-violent protest). Enter the second in the two search engines above, and see when the first term first pops up in the list of hits. The higher on the list, the better the search engine.

Four steps of a basic search

Here we get into the meat of Part 1. Searchin is not just finding. It is a part of a larger process, of which I have arbitrarily divided into four steps (you can use a much finer granularity if you want, but we don't have time for that.)

Key Words: Finding and Entering 

Activity 3: Try getting some information on orthodontistry.

Dealing with Results, narrowing the field

Activity 4: Try looking at the results for "pancakes" which ones are likely to be about the kind you eat, not the make-up or the computer chip. Look at the resulting hits. Use the checklist above.

 

Back and forth, selecting out the best of the best

These things can save you a lot of work in the next step. If you decide to print out your document, you should check the length. One student of mine pushed the print button 17 times before the first page came out because the document was 50 pages long! Talk about impatient.

On these long pages, you should use the Find command to find that key word. It may turn up in a funny place, not related to your topic at all. 

Use that back button to go back to the search results page if you don't find anything quickly. Don't wander too far into the site. I have wasted hours that way (well, not wasted, incidental learning does take place.)

Get the info to your hard disk

Activity 5: Ask Kevin for a floppy to try out some of these techniques. He's not sure of the setup at TUT, so this may not be possible.

Go to Part 2       Go to Search Seminar Index