WEB LITERACY K.Parra, M.A.

H OW MUCH DO YOU KNOW ABOUT INFORMATION LITERACY ? Take a short quiz.

1. List 4 Major search engines and a major directory. Search Engines vs. Directories Search Engine: Search engines have databases built up by "robots", which visit websites and add information to their database. Directory: Directories are human edited and build their indexes with editors who visit websites, and add to the directory the sites that they consider to be a valuable resource. Yahoo! Directory Kids.yahoo.com About.com The Librarians Index to the Internet Google Altavista Lycos Infoseek Ask.com Yahoo

2.What is a blog? Blog is short for weblog – it is literally a log on the Web.

3. Why might you use quotation marks when conducting a search? Use “quotation marks” to ensure your keywords appear in your search results in the order you have specified. Example: black squirrels vs. “black squirrels” 12,000,000 hits 121,000 hits

4. URL is an acronym for... Uniform Resource Locator The URL is the address of a resource, or file, available on the Internet.

5. Identify three Boolean search terms. AND OR NOT AND narrows a search by combining terms Example: Portland AND Oregon OR broadens a search to include results that contain either of the words you type Example: liberal OR democrat NOT will narrow a search by excluding search terms Example: Oregon NOT travel

6.What is a domain name? The domain name system helps to give every Internet server a memorable and easy-to-spell address. Example: kean.edu nytimes.com bergen.org lowes.com macys.com nj.gov kimparra.com

What are their domains?

7. How do you find the owner or publisher of a website?

Who owns/publishes these websites? Search at:

8. Identify these extensions and what they represent.

9. How do you find out who is linked to your school’s Web site? (Kean University) Do A Link: Command Search in Altavista 6,500 links Link: domain Try It!

10. How do you find the history of any given website? archive.org

13. How do sites get to the top of a result list in Google? One factor Google uses to rank sites is popularity. It counts the number of links from sites all around the Web. The higher number of links to a site, the higher Google will rank that site on a list of results. There are several additional factors as well, including but not limited to the title of the site, the site’s meta information and the actual content of the site.

How did you score? 0 – 5 Points: Somewhat Savvy 6 – 10 Points: Moderately Savvy 10+ Points: Nerdy

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