Search Engines and Internet Resources Standard 1: Objective 3 Use tools to yield requested data for Web searches including: search engines & appropriate keywords.

What is a network? Network- two or more computers that are connected for the purpose of sharing information. There are two main types: LAN – A local area network (LAN) is a computer network covering a small area, like a home, office or small group of buildings. Computers that are near each other. WAN – A wide area network or WAN is a computer network covering a broad geographical area. The most well-known example of a WAN is the internet.

The “internet” is… The world’s largest computer network A collection of local, regional, and national computer networks It is linked together with other networks to exchange data and distribute processing tasks.

How IT works… The internet is simply a wire –network connection A server is a special computer connected to the internet where web pages are stored. A client is a computer connected to a network.

What is the WWW? The internet and the World Wide Web are not synonymous! The Web is actually something that is available via the internet. The internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks. The Web is a collection of interconnected documents, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.

Browsers A Browser is software which allows you to view information on the World Wide Web. Three commonly used browsers are: Internet Explorer Mozilla Firefox Google Chrome

Search Engine A program that uses KEYWORDS to search the World Wide Web.

Types of Search Engines Ranking –based Social-bookmarking Sites

Ranking Based Search engines What are Search Engines? Search Engines are algorithm based systems which mine/dig information based on certain pre-determined factors and suggest the most relevant pages to the users. Popular examples of search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. What are Social Bookmarking Sites? Social Bookmarking Sites are websites which allow users to share their most liked pages and sites for other site users to discover. They rely more on the community than on computer programs for data-mining. Some popular examples are StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Twitter and Facebook.

Keyword Searches People most often use Keyword searches A key word search is where you simply type the words you are searching for into the search bar in your engine. Key word searches return many unrelated results because any page that contains any of the key words satisfies the searching criteria. If at first you don’t find what you want, REFINE!

Phrase Searching Phrase searching = grouping words together inside quotation marks This will only return pages when those words appear next to each other. For instance “George Washington” will only give results where “George” and “Washington” appear next to each other instead of any page with “George” or any page with “Washington” If you are searching for more than one phrase, separate the phrases with a comma: “George Washington”, “Valley Forge”

Search Engine Math Math symbols can be used to make keywords more specific thereby refining your search results. -Suppose you are making a cake and you want a recipe for peanut butter but not chocolate –search for +”peanut butter”+recipe-chocolate+cake This tells the search engine to find a cake recipe that does not contain chocolate but has peanut butter.

Boolean Searching Boolean logic is another way to search which is similar to search engine math but has a little more power. Boolean logic is based on a simple YES or NO ranking system. Boolean logic consists of 3 logical operators -AND -OR -NOT Sometimes it’s easier to narrow a search by specifying what you are NOT looking for.

Boolean –THE AND Operator The AND operator instructs the Search Engine to search for ALL documents containing ALL words you specify. Examples If you type Utah AND Jazz …it should decrease the number of results.

Boolean –The OR operator The OR operator instructs the Search Engine to search for documents containing EITHER word you specify. Examples: If you type Utah OR Jazz – it should increase your number of results.

Boolean –The NOT operator The NOT operator instructs the Search Engine to search for documents that DO NOT contain word/s following NOT (this does not always work). Examples: Utah NOT Jazz…should filter your results.

TRY it out Boolean Operator Number of Hits Decrease or Increase Utah Jazz Utah AND Jazz AND Utah NOT Jazz NOT Utah OR Jazz OR

Wildcard searching The symbol * or asterisk can be used as a wildcard character in the Web search. If you do not know the spelling of a word you can use the wildcard character in place of the letters you are unsure of. Let’s say you wanted information on Albuquerque, NM and you didn’t know how to spell it Search for Albu* NM Not all search engines support wildcard characters