Project 3

Search Engines

Chapter 3

You are encouraged to review the reading materials and answer the review questions in the book and the self-check study questions. You are responsible for checking your own answers to the self-check study questions. This will give you an opportunity to see that you have an understanding of the important concepts for the project. It will also give you something to use as a study guide for the midterm and final exams. If you do not understand the answers given in the self-checks, it is important to seek help!

Self-Check of Concepts from Chapter 3

  1. Name six major search engines
  2. Name six popular meta-search tools
  3. List three common Boolean operators
  4. Name two implied Boolean operators
  5. True/False. Most search engines automatically assume an OR relationship between two words if you don't type anything between them.
  6. Suppose you are using a search engine that allows natural language searches and you type the following statement as a search expression:
    I need rules for playing volleyball
    What words would be likely to be considered as stop words (words that are ignored by the search engine)?
  7. What punctuation is commonly used by most search engines to indicate words should be searched as a phrase rather than individual terms?
  8. What symbol is often used to take advantage of a feature in a search engine referred to as truncation or stemming?
  9. Many search engines include advanced search forms to use field searching instead of only searching the text of the web page. Name two fields that could be used for searching.
  10. True/False. Most search engines pay attention to any capitalization you use in search words.

 

Practice Activity

VISITING SEARCH ENGINE HELP PAGES

Because not all search engines work in the same way, it is necessary to visit the search engine’s home page and locate the tips given for using the search engine effectively. Nearly all search engines offer “help” pages to their users. For the next group of questions, follow the instructions to visit the search engine site and find the answers in the “help” pages of the search engine. The directions will guide you to the help pages, however, things change rapidly on the Internet, so if you don’t see exactly what the instructions say to do, look around at the search engine yourself to locate the tips for searching.

Google logo

GOOGLE
http://www.google.com

  1. Is Google case sensitive?
  2. In Google, if you use several terms in your search string and do NOT use Boolean operators, will Google search for pages that match ALL of the terms or does it search for pages that have ANY one of the terms, but not necessarily all of them?
  3. Does the order in which you type in the keywords you are searching for affect the results in Google?
  4. What are some common words that Google ignores as search terms?
  5. What does it mean when Google says it supports "stemming" for your search results ?
  6. How do you do a phrase search in Google without using the Advanced Search window?
  7. When you add math symbols to a keyword, it is important to NOT include a space between the sign and the keyword. Is there supposed to be a space BEFORE the symbol to separate it from the previous keyword?
  8. Return to the Google Help Center page, under Search Guides click on "Setting Preferences" What is the purpose of the Safe Search Filtering feature?

Return to the Google Home page--you can click on the Google logo! Then click on the link "Advanced Search" that is to the right of the keyword textbox.

  1. In the "Occurrences" line for "Return results where my terms occur"....drop down the list arrow beside "anywhere on the page." What other choices are listed in the drop down list for where terms will occur?

  2. In the Advanced Search window at Google, go to the textbox labeled "with the exact phrase" and type in the words: bald eagle. Click the Google search button and note how many search results are listed in the blue bar at the top of the page. How many results are listed in the line that says: "Results 1-10 of about ?????. Search took ?? seconds."

  3. Go back to the Advanced Search window and drop down the list for occurrences. Choose "In the URL of the page" and do the search again. This time how many results are listed?

  4. Go back to the Advanced Search window and drop down the list for occurrences. Choose "In the title of the page" and do the search again. This time how many results are listed?

  5. Go back to the Advanced Search window and drop down the list for occurrences. Choose "In the links to the page" and do the search again. This time how many results are listed?

  6. Go back to the Advanced Search window and drop down the list for occurrences. Choose "anywhere in the page " and also go to the box labeled "return results from the site or domain" and type in: .gov
    Do the search again. Visit the first page of the results list. Give an important fact about the bald eagle that you see on this page.

  7. Go back to the Advanced Search window and drop down the list for occurrences. Choose "anywhere in the page " and also go to the box labeled "return results from the site or domain" and type in: .org
    Do the search again. Visit the first page of the results list. What organization published the page?

  8. In the Advanced Search page at Google, what are the choices in the drop down list for searching by Date?

  9. Go to: http://www.alltheweb.com and go to the advanced search page. In the "Search for" text box drop down the choice for "The exact phrase" and then in the textbox beside it type in the words: life span. Scroll down the page to find the "Word Filters" section and in the textbox to the right of "Must include" type in the words: bald eagle. Choose "In the title" in the drop down list box to the right of where you typed in bald eagle. Click on the Search button. How many results show up on the results page?

  10. For the previous search, after the list of (sponsored) links, visit a page that is given in the search results that provides facts about the bald eagle. Who published the information for this page?

Visit All The Web at: http://www.alltheweb.com

On the home page at All The Web, click on the "Help" link that is near the bottom of the page. On the Help page, look in the list of Frequently Asked Questions and click on the link for "Query Language" to get tips on special words that can be used to significantly narrow a search without going to the Advanced search page! These help tremendously when searching for well-designed, informative pages on a topic.  Try the following search to try out how the "title" search feature helps to refine a search.

On the home page of All The Web, type in  the word octopus in the search box and click on Search.

  1. How many items were returned?

    In the search box type: title:octopus
  2. How many items were returned?
  3. How does the search engine narrow the search using this keyword phrase?

Don't forget to CHECK YOUR ANSWERS.

For more online practice with searches:
http://searchengineshowdown.com/strat/basicsearch.html
http://searchengineshowdown.com/strat/advancedsearch.shtml

Lab Activity - to be graded

Send answers to the lab activity to the instructor.

Select a very specific topic that you would like to seek information for by using a search engine and the Internet. This should NOT be a broad, general topic. You should use at least three descriptive nouns. The most important terms should be listed first.

Examples:
Too broad: St. Louis Cardinals
Better: +pujols +statistics
Best: +pujols +"batting average" +2005

Answer these questions about the search you performed. To earn maximum points, describe what you used from what you learned in this project to improve the effectiveness of your search. Be sure to take advantage of the advanced search tools available with search engines.

  1. What search engine did you use and what information were you trying to locate?
  2. What keywords did you use? For maximum points, include punctuation with your keywords like the plus sign, minus, sign, and/or quotation marks. List at least 3 words. Words must be descriptive and have at least four letters.
  3. Use an advanced search feature (other than a title field search) and describe how it was used to narrow your search results? Be specific.
    For example: I used a title field search like:
    title: pujols
    When using a title field search the only results that display are pages with the word Pujols in the title.
  4. Give the complete URL for the best page you found for your information. When you give the URL, be sure that it is on a new line by itself and includes the entire URL, including the http. It should look something like:

    http://www.somewhere.org/internet/pagename.html

  5. Visit the Google Web Search Features page at:
    http://www.google.com/help/features.html

    You will find a bulleted list with everything from "Book Search" to "Who Links To You" features. Visit the links to features that are interesting to you. Read how to use the feature in Google. Tell me about two of the features that you think you will use.

  6. If you are using the AllTheWeb search engine and want to know special keywords that can be used to help define a search, you can go to the Help >> Frequently Asked Questions >> Query Language page. What are the FIVE special keywords that can be used with AllTheWeb searches?

  7. List any information about how to use search engines that was new or of special interest to you in this project.

    (If there was no new information for you within the project, visit the advanced search page at www.Teoma.com and describe what features are available for advanced searching with this search engine.
  8. How long did it take for you to do the reading and complete this project?

 

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