Day III 7th July 2015

The lesson began with the introduction of “Web Search” whereby participants were familiarized with its benefits and how to go about web searching and what is all about Web search.

My understanding as per our tutors presentation on web search was looking for information on internet that helps us in particular use. He also explained that among many search engines most popular search engines used today are  Google, Bing and Yahoo. The results displayed are typically prioritized by relevance, so those who search the Web can quickly find material that is relevant to their needs. Without a search engine, finding information and resources on the Internet is very difficult, especially when specific servers and domains containing desired information are unknown.

What is internet?

Search engines are programs that search documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. A search engine is really a general class of programs, however, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Google, Bing and Yahoo! Search that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.

Since different search engines use different methods to search for the result we were, therefore, introduced with different kinds of “Operators” they were;

• Use of Boolean Operators

• Using AND operator

• Truncation

• Wildcards

• File type

• Site

Boolean Operators 

They are simple words (AND, OR, NOT or AND NOT) used as conjunctions to combine or exclude keywords in a search, resulting in more focused and productive results. This should save time and effort by eliminating inappropriate hits that must be scanned before discarding.

Using AND operators The AND & OR operators are used to filter records based on more than one condition. The AND operator displays a record if both the first condition AND the second condition are true.

Truncation

Truncation, also called stemming, is a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings. To use truncation, enter the root of a word and put the truncation symbol at the end. Examples: 

child* = child, childs, children, childrens, childhood

genetic* = genetic, genetics, genetically

Truncation symbols may vary by database; common symbols include: *, !, ?, or #

Wildcards:

Similar to truncation, wildcards substitute a symbol for one letter of a word. This is useful if a word is spelled in different ways, but still has the same meaning.

Examples: 

wom!n = woman, women

colo?r = color, colour

Restricting your search using site operators

We can search within a site or a domain by adding the site: operator followed by a site’s domain name to your query. For example, you could search for archaeology site: www.une.edu.au.

To conduct a comprehensive search of all of the associated sub domains of a domain, omit the www and instead specify only the main domain. For example, a search for site:bbs.com would encompass not just www.bbs.com, but also news.bbs.com, sports.bbs.com, and so forth. The site: search operator works even when just the domain extension (like .com, .org, .gov, or .co.uk) is specified. Thus, we can restrict our search to .com sites with site:com, to .gov sites with site:gov, or to .org.bt.  

Restricting your search by format  

we can restrict our search to Word documents, to Excel documents, to PDF files, or to PowerPoint files by adding filetype:doc, filetype:xls, filetype:pdf, or filetype:ppt, respectively, to your search query. If we want a  PowerPoint presentation on How to integrate ICT in subject  Simply query Google for “integrate ICT in Mathematics filetype:ppt”

Towards the end of today’s lesson we were briefed on the benefits of using Google books and google help centre. Google Books is a Google service that makes discovering book content easier for us on the web. It started way back in 2004 and since then its mission has been to digitally scan and archive tons of book.

Google Help centre Help Forums. 

While surfing the nets we often get different result, in order to get the exact information, making a thorough search with multiple search engine is must. Having learnt the use of the search operators I am now able to work much faster  and smarter and carry out online activities smoothly than before.   

As a part of exercises we were assigned with home assignment which consisted of searching Educational web sites. Implementing all the techniques and methods I was able to search more than 10 educational web sites and submit it on time.

Thanks