Exercise08

Ex 7.3.2 - Searching

KNOWLEDGE

USING A SEARCH ENGINE

A search engine is a specialist web site that allows you to search the Web thus locating a list of web pages/sites of interest to you. You don’t in fact search the whole Web as that is too vast. What you do is search through the search engines database of web pages – this is a summary of what are on the pages themselves. The search engine compiles this database by working through the Web and recording what is there. Different search engines generate their databases in different ways and thus searching with different engines will give different results. Searching the Web through a search engine makes your search a lot quicker as you are only searching a relatively small database compared to the whole Web. Search engines are best used if you're looking for web sites or general information rather than looking for a friend's e-mail address.

Some well know search engines include:

www.yahoo.co.uk

www.altavista.co.uk

www.google.com

www.ask.co.uk

Using a search engine is reasonably straight forward in that you type a word or string of words into the Search box and then press Enter.

The search engine will then display a list of answers to your question and you decide which hyperlink to click, thus taking you to a page on the Web. If that web page doesn't look like what you are looking for you can always return to the search engine results (click the Back button on your browser) and select another option.

You can improve the quality of the search results you achieve by using certain search engines for certain tasks or more commonly by taking care over the question you ask.

Try this	Effect
London Town Town London	Search engines normally give priority to the first word you type so if you are looking for information on London it is better to type London first.
and or the	Try to avoid using commonly used words as it may distort the results you get.
Microsoft	If you just type Microsoft in your search query you will get a lot of pages, millions in fact. Be more specific, type Microsoft Word or better still Microsoft Word XP.
'Microsoft Word XP'	With many search engines typing quotes around the words means the search will focus on pages that contain all three words rather than contain one or two of them.
+ and -	Including a plus sign ('+') before a word makes sure all the pages that are listed contain that word. Including a minus sign ('-') before a word makes sure all the pages that are listed do NOT contain that word.
Logical searches AND/OR/NOT	You can improve the quality of search results by using the Boolean operators AND/OR/NOT. If you type Queen OR Elizabeth OR Ship you will get results which include pages on Queens, on Elizabeths and on Ships. If you type Queen AND Elizabeth AND Ship you will only get pages about the Queen Elizabeth Ship.
Advanced searches	Many search engines include an "advanced search" option which helps you to focus your search. Try them and see how it improves your searches.

FURTHER INFORMATION

To read further information about the topic(s) discussed in this exercise try visiting the following web site(s):

www.bbc.co.uk/webwise - Online Course/Searching

www.ask.co.uk - Search Engine

www.google.co.uk - Search Engine

ONLINE PRACTICAL EXERCISE

Practice using the Google search engine by typing the following searches into the search bar below and click the Search button to display the results:

Microsoft Word Workbook
IT Online Course
Online Computer Course
ECDL Online Course
NVQ iTQ Online Course


PRACTICE

Hence, you now need to learn about how to "Use search engines."


	Check your current knowledge by taking a