Excerpted with permission from the 1998 Summercore Primer (The French Lick Edition) by The Original Teaching Company ... Steve Bergen and Lynne Schalman ... these are pages 414-417 ...this section written by Lynne Schalman ... the Summercore Primer is available by contacting summercore@nobles.edu
Getting Started in Searching
Many people avoid the Web like the plague because after several confusing and frustrating hours spent looking for information that never seems to appear, they decide that the Web is more hype than hypermedia. But after spending a few more hours, they might just decide that Surfing the Web is more fun and certainly more rewarding than watching the Boston Celtics.
There are basically two ways to find information in the incredibly rich, but sometimes frustrating, wealth of resources on the Internet: Search engines, like AltaVista, Infoseek, WebCrawler, and Subject Directories, Like Yahoo, Excite and Galaxy.
What's an Internet subject directory?
Subject directories categorize Internet sites by subject; Searchers of information can select a starting broad category and then browse the list of resources in that category. Users conduct their searches by clicking on progressively more narrow search terms from a number of subcategories. In this way, you move through increasingly more specific subgroupings until you reach a final list of resources that fits your needs.
For example, if you were using the Yahoo subject directory to find Social Studies lesson plans, you would start at the First Page of Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) which presents the top level of the directory where there are approximately 15 general categories, including “Business and Economy” and “Education.” Selecting “Education” would lead you to a list of about 40 subheadings, including “K-12,” “Humanities,: “Teaching,” and “Math and Science.” Selecting “K-12” would lead to another page of Subheadings, including “Newspapers,” “Social Studies,” and “Resources.”
If you click on “Social Studies,” you will arrive at a webpage with a list of resources for teaching Social Studies, including indexes specifically designed with links to many more Social Studies resources, and specific links to other helpful web sites, like Amazon Adventure, a New Zealand-based project, aimed at K12 students and schools, an online tour of Amazônia, placing special emphasis on the region's history, people, and environment; or Computers in the Social Studies, a journal dedicated to the encouragement of the use of computers and related technology in K-12 social studies classrooms; or Great Canadian History Page, dedicated to learning and teaching about Canadian Social Studies/History; or History and Social Studies Web Site for K-12; or Teachers Lesson Plans and Resources for Social Studies Teachers. Clicking on the last choice will take you to a website with the URL of http://www.csun.edu/~hcedu013/ index.html. This page was designed by a middle school History teacher to provide other educators easy access to web resources such as Lesson Plans and Teaching Strategies, Online Activities, Newsgroups and Mailing Lists.
Subject directories will not have links to every piece of information on the Internet. Since they are created by humans (rather than by computer programs), they are much smaller than search engine databases. Moreover, every directory is different and its value will depend on how widely the company searches for information, its method of categorizing the resources, how well information is kept current, etc. As the Web grows, these directories are really more of a “Best of the Web” than a complete database of web sites. It it helpful to think of Subject Directories as your local librarian who can guide you through a card catalog and provide helpful suggestions about valuable books and resources in your own library.
What's an Internet Search Engine?
A Search engine is basically a computer program that collects information about roughly 50-100 million Web pages and then indexes the information into a database and then allows you to search that database. There is no human being categorizing and evaluating the quality of individual web sites. But using an index search gives you access to greater numbers of web sites than a subject directory like Yahoo. Search results from these engines use an algorithm to sort through documents to determine their relevancy--for instance, the number of times a key-word appears as well as its proximity to the top of the document. But indexes are basically brute force idiot machines, meaning they are unable to grasp the subtleties of the English language like recognizing context, matching synonyms, or figuring out homonyms. A search using the keyword “beat” might return links to sites about Jack Kerouac but you will also get links to pages about the rare game when the Celtics beat the Suns, The Beat Goes on, and Music Central.
What's better - a search engine or a subject directory?
There is only one answer: it depends. Much depends on the personal preferences and skills of the user. Some people, particularly those starting out with web searching, like directories because they can work their way through the categories, limiting the choices to specific topics. They don’t have to worry too much about coming up with Keywords to search on or figuring out Boolean terms. Subject directories work best if you have a specific theme or category in mind; for instance, you know that you are looking for writing projects for lower school science or links to teaching about the Holocaust.
Search engines allow for complicated search terms so that you can find more specific resources by either broadening or narrowing your searches with AND, OR, or NOT. Also, search engines have links to many millions of web pages so if your subject is complex and somewhat off the beaten path, then you might have more luck finding what you need with a Search engine. Because you don’t have to rely on the specific categories created by a Directory, you will have more flexibility with a Search engine. So Directories can be better for finding general information while Search engines can be better for finding specific info. But the truth is that there is no hard and fast rule and sometimes you will want and need to use both.
Both a strength and a weakness of the search engines is the very extensive amount of hits that they will give you. One search could produce thousands of hits, enough to make you crazy. Knowing how to create effective and efficient searches is a skill and there is a learning curve. Are there search engines just for younger students?
The advantage of using search engine for kids is that they automatically filter out offensive sites and provide a shorter, perhaps easier to use, list of links. The sites are also screened to provide sites particularly appropriate in their depth of material and reading level required.
1. Yahooligans: http://www.yahooligans.com
2. Lycos for Kids: http://www.lycos.com/kids
3. AOL Netfind for Kids Only: http://www.aol.com/netfind/kids
4. Disney DIG site: http://www.dig.com
What are some Searching tips?
1. Think up a few key words that describe your topic.
2. Use a thesaurus to find synonyms to broaden your search.
3. If at first you don’t succeed, alter your key words; maybe use a minus sign to eliminate those web sites that contain irrelevant information.
4. Be careful with capitalization: capitalize proper names but don’t capitalize more general terms.
5. Put quotation marks around words that you want to be treated as one phrase within a web site. “lesson plans” will be much more helpful than lesson plans because with the latter entry you will get web sites that include either lesson or plans, but not necessarily those much valued pages that will help out all teachers.
6. Most search engines let you put a + in front of the words that must be included (by the way, there should not be a space between the + and the keyword) and a - in front of words you do not want included. So if your students are doing a report on Boston, but you don’t want them bogged down with sports trivia, you would enter the search terms Boston -Celtics.
7. Learn that most search engines allow for simple keyword searches on their main page, but that you need to click on Advanced Search or a similar term to go to the search page that allows you to include the Boolean operators of AND, OR and NOT.
8. Learn to use one or two search pages well, mastering perhaps one Search engine and one Directory. All of them have their quirks so you will be most successful and the least frustrated if you spend some time learning the search features of one site. Don’t go crazy trying too many search engines.
9. Be persistent; it is easy to give up. Maybe all you need to do is add a keyword to your search or use an advanced search feature. Look at a several pages worth of hits that you have received to figure out where you went wrong in entering your key words. Or sometimes you just have to check your spelling or punctuation.
10. Bookmark a page once you find it.
What is a Boolean search and Why would I ever want to do that?
Most of the search engines allow you to either broaden or narrow your search by allowing you to put AND, OR, or NOT between your keywords. Most of the time you will have to go the Advanced Search Page or an Options Page; so you need to look for a link to the advanced search web page.
AND can be used as a connector between two key words so that you can narrow a search to a manageable number of hits. For example, with “women AND history” as the search term, you will get a list of links to sites which have both of these words present in a document. It will ignore documents which have just the word “women”" in it (e.g., Women in America) and it will ignore documents which have just the word “history” in it (e.g., Civil War History). These words, however, do not have to be contiguous. For even more narrow searches, you can use AND more than once. For example, "women and history and United States" would limit your search even more since all three terms would have to be present for a link to the document.
NOT narrows the search by forcing the search engine to exclude certain words. For example, the search term “women NOT history” would give you links to information on topics relevant to women but not if the term “history” is present. It is possible to combine AND and NOT. For example, the term “basketball AND players not Jordan” would give you information on various basketball players. But you would not get information on Number 23.
OR can broaden the search. You might use “or” if there were synonyms for your keywords. If you want to buy a car, then you could enter “car OR automobile” to get more hits. For wider searches, you can use “OR” more than once. For example, “museums OR galleries OR art history or paintings” would create a broad search.