Week 5

Lecture

In today's lecture we were learning about search engines. There are three categories of infromation that you can find on the web, such as :
The Free, Visible Web.
The Free, Invisible Web.
and Paid Databases over the Web.

There is only two catagories of search tools, these are :
Search Engines
and Directories

A search engine is a web-based applicaction which crawls the internet, making indices of websites, usually from the information of text contained on them. Example of search engines are
Google
Yahoo
AltaVista
and AlltheWeb

Some problems that can come across when using search enginges could be that there are too many results, limited relevance or quality filtering of results to a search queary, misuse of page scoring/ranking system and building enormous indicies that include erroneous, irrelevant and out-dated results to user.

We then leart about directories which are human-edited pages. Web pages that get submitted to directored are reviewed and added by manual submission to ensure quality of the site. This can prevent pages being submitted automaticially which leads to troubles. There are many types of directories, here are some of the most reliable sort:
DMOZ....................................http://dmoz.org/
Google Directory .................http://directory.google.com/
Yahoo Directory...................http://dir.yahoo.com/
Look Smart ..........................http://www.looksmart.com/
About ....................................http://www.about.com/

Some search tips could be to use several search tools, read the search tips or help information at each search engine, for keyword searches use several words, guess a location, Select the wheat from the chaff by thinking about what you want, back up to find out where you are and use advanced search functions to narrow down the search.


Tutorial

I went onto the Monash website to read the information and four strategies that will help me to structure a good search in my Learning Log was
1) Keyword
2)Phrase
3)Boolean
4)Advanced / engine features
In the tutorial we had to do a quiz which in this quiz i finished all the questions but needed the Internet to help me out with the answers. to get the answers sufficiently i used the main point and used inverted commas and brackets.


When searching for a quote on a search engine it is best to enclose the question in quotation marks, for example "To be or not to be". This will force the search engine to search for the words in this exact order, and will reconize the phrase as a famous quote from Hamlet. If this phrase is not done this way the search engine will chokes because they will become stop words, (unimportant words which are too short and too comman to be considered relevant strings on which to search.)

When searching for a a web page of authors or genre's, for example writer and mystery it is better to enclose the text as a phrase, you would have a better chance of getting better hits. If you enter the text as they are the search engines would most likely send back hyperlinks to all Web documents that contain those words, this could contan hundreds of thousands of URLs.
If you know what topic of your questions is use a web directory rather than a search engine. Directories will probally not give you as much references as a search engine would, but are mostly likely to be on topic.

If you are wanting to find a Web page which is published from Yahoo, then select the Computers and Internet Topic, under this you should find a subtopic of the World Wide Web. By clicking on this link you will find another list of subtopics, many of which are relevant to your search. Selecting one of these subtopics will eventually take you to Web pages which have been posted exactly for the purpose of giving you the information desired.

These exercises will help me through out university as it will make it easier for me to find my information and will cut down the time i am using to search and put that time to completing my work.



Reading 1
A search engine consists of the boundry you use to type in a query, When you use a search engine, you are asking it to look in its index to find matches with the words you have typed in. Regional- Some search engines are limited geographically. For example, only information on Web sites in Australia may be indexed.
Targeted- limit themselves to one subject, like biography, medicine, graphics, art, fishing,
Reference-These provide information from a set of reference works, such as an encyclopedia. Britannica.
Directories- Directories are categorized lists of sites picked out by human editors. Directory databases are therefore much smaller than those of search engines.

Reading 2
when searching about topics using a "sum" can help it as an example is: use +history+medieval, or documents mentioning both, another way of getting a specific topic is using 'Boolean' logic example is: use history AND medieval for documents mentioning both.

Reading 3
Keyword Analysis,
Setting your Benchmark - Includes recording your current ranking for every keyword phrase in the search results, how many page have been indexed and much more.
Search Engine Optimisation - Completion of the search engine optimization, carry on the search engine and directory submissions.