1a List 4 Strategies that will help you to structure a good search
The Principles of Smart Searching
1. Know Where to look first
When looking for info on a person, company, health problem, job vacancies, organise a holiday. There are lots of databases that information on them that is more use than general search engines.
2. Fine Tune you Keywords
If searching on a name of person, place or thing. Remember most nouns are subsets of other nouns. So enter the smallest subset and be specific. For example, CAR = Toyota = Toyota Dealerships and in Geraldton.
3. Be refined.
Read help files and take advantage of search refining options. Use phrases if you can. Use the Boolean AND, learn to exclude with the Boolean NOT. Excluding is important as the Web grows and more documents posted.
4. Anticipate answers.
Before starting, imagine the ideal page you would like to access would look like. ie the Words in the title, and the how the sentences in the first paragraph would go. Now use those keywords when entering your search query.
Complete the online quiz and do a screen shot of your results page
Some of the strategies I used to locate the answers to the quiz were
1. Using more than just the one keyword to enter into google search.
2. Copy and paste the keywords into google to save time, then copy and paste the answers back into the quiz answer section to avoid spelling mistakes and save time.
3. When in the search results pages, I would quickly run through the previews (brief summaries under headings) to evaluate if they were going to be useful.
4. Using quotations marks when entering in titles of books or titles of paintings.
5. Using knowledge I had already gained on a subject to evaluate whether it was relevant to my quiz questions ie Inca civilisation
So far in this Module on Research and Techniques I have learnt that the World Wide Web is a wonderful tool that makes research more accessible to a much wider range of the population. But it isnt the be all and end all. Care must be taken to evaluate the information, and you need to question the validity nearly everything you access.
You need to be aware of a few basic rules to make your searching much more productive and accurate.
1. Be aware of what the domain names represent ie .com, .org, .edu.
2. Be aware as to the accuracy of the information, anyone can publish on the web, there are no web standards to ensure accuracy.
3. Authority check - see who the author is and what are their qualifications, who is the sponsor(greenpeace) of the site.
4. Currency check on the date whether when published, when updated, when first put onto web.
5. Objectivity (bias)
6. Authentication where is it, who wrote it, sources of information, validation of information.
The lecture notes this week were about using search engines to effect more valuable searches.
Search Tools fall into 2 main types
- search engines
- directories (guides to search engines)
What is search engines - a web based application that crawls the net, creating indices of websites, usually from the text information contained in summaries. Sites are indexed according to keywords
Some search engines are Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, AlltheWeb
Some problems associated with search engines; return of too many results, limited relevance or quality filtering of results, can build massives indices from wrong, irrelevant, outdated results,
Search Engines Interface
use different tools to get results; keywords, phrase, boolean, advanced.
Search Tips
1. Use several search tools
2. Read search tips or help info at each search engine
3. For keyword searches, use several words
4. Guess a location
5. Think about what you want
6. Back up to find out where you are
The readings this week are basically about Internet search tips and strategies for searching. Very usefull actually.
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