Modelling the WWW (Internet) - Extension activity introducing indexes An activity for a whole class of primary children. This activity can be used to teach children how search engines work using hats and string. This resource adds to the resource already made by Graham Hastings called modelling the WWW. This resource extends Graham’s by explaining to children how indexes are used by search engines to ensure that we get results back in a realistic amount of time. Aims: To show the difference between the internet and WWW and a search engine. To model the way search engines work to provide a researcher with information. To show that the internet itself is not searched at the time of a researcher looking for information. To make the point that not all the Web pages search engines find have useful information and that a great deal of thought goes into returning pages to the researcher in most useful order first. Background CPD: If you would like to help your own understanding you could watch this video first:

I made all the resources into hats with simple bands, except for the web pages. I then put the children into groups of 4-5 as a server and gave them a city name and some web pages. I then appointed one child as researcher and one as google itself. We did the search as per Graham’s instructions with google going off and searching each web site for relevant pages on who wrote the books about Pooh bear. I didn’t really talk much about reducing the search to keywords but did highlight the more recently added capability of search engines (google) to auto-complete your query and show instant results. I then posed the question to the children that things didn’t work this way in reality and asked if they could guess why. This allows you to see if you have any children who can already think about large scale systems and their performance etc. Performance would be slow and the search would take far to long to carry out this way. (Over 15 billion web pages !) We then introduced the spider bots which are computer programs that constantly create indexes.

Google then held an index card containing the keywords of winnie pooh author. The spider bots then went off and started to attach strings to web pages on servers with web pages that contained the keywords of the search string and return the other end of the strings to the google index person. At this point I explained that no search had yet been entered by the researcher and that google had already created indexes. We then did the search and this time: google searched its own indexes, if there were strings attached to keywords those strings were gently tugged and the servers passed the web pages along the string back to google. I then asked google (and the children acting as spider bots which don’t do this job for real) to discuss and decide what order they would give the pages to the researcher. While this chat went on I asked the server groups to discuss how they would sort or rank the pages. I then asked for their ideas and just added a little information to this about google asking 200 questions to decide of the ranking of pages. We didn’t spend long on page ranking.

If this all sounds very complicated you could watch the video and it all becomes much clearer. There are lesson/session plans for this learning and also I have shared some very simple notebook pages. So with a little laminating and hat making your ready to go! Of course if your pushed for time you can just print this resource and Graham’s resource and go with the children holding pieces of paper. Let me know if you find this useful and please me if you have queries.

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