Mastery of search engine anatomy would help with the role of the developing information literacy with colleagues and students. First, colleagues would create web pages and add links according to what each search engine uses to prioritize relevance rankings, such as using a theme, using two words in the title, not having any images in the first ten lines because the spiders or web crawlers cannot read images. Also, when colleagues and students are familiar with Boolean logic, searches are narrowed down even more to include relevant results. Knowing the difference between a Directory and a Search Engine is beneficial for specific searches; for example, an elementary class is better off to use the DMOZ Directory for looking up information about a specific topic, such as owls. Because search engines do not use the same formulae for relevance ranking, one may look up a topic on more than one search engine and find relevant results from each search engine maximizing research. Teaching how to Keyword search is important--See "The Spider's Apprentice" posted by Brooke--. Showing students the different search engines using one topic would be a good lesson for students to see the results.
Searches using more than one search engine will give even more relevant results than just using Google, for instance. Also, I learned that because each search engine is in such a competitive business that they will use unique features to appeal to its clientele. For instance, phrases enclosed in double quotes is a feature in Yahoo! Search. Boolean logic is used in most search engines. Yahoo! Search allows easy access to synonyms, dictionaries, and encyclopedias; however, Google users have access to Google Books, Google Scholar, Google Images, and a whole lot more.
Since most of the class has not heard of the DMOZ Directory before taking this class and now each of us teaches others to search more than one search engine, we have opened up the doors to more effective searching techniques and a broader range of material that might have otherwise been skipped over.
I liked the idea of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative of standardizing metadata of Internet resources. As several people in the class noted, I was not aware of the term "metadata" before either. Standardizing Internet resources seems like an insurmountable task; however, it is an excellent organization tool which will improve relevant search results. As more and more relevant hits are missed because of currency of updates and irrelevant information, etc. a more structured system of description and organization is needed. It seems like a very complex task with so many unanswered questions. The simplest user friendly specific version is the answer because if the task is more work than it is worth, people will not use it. Appendix 1: Dublin Core Metadata schema chart has enough information that a query of any of these elements will bring up a relevant result.
I almost shut down reading all of this technical information; however, I reread the readings in this lesson to get a better grasp of the terms. This is a very interesting lesson; one could get lost just clicking on more and more informational links--just amazing. I feel a little frustrated with DMOZ. I tried to search in DMOZ, but was not very successful. I am not sure why, but I will keep trying, so that I can offer more than one choice of search engines and directories to teachers and students. I asked my English 12 students if they have used DMOZ for research before and they have not. The students are working on an author research assignment. I would like to take advantage of the DMOZ Directory to see if this is a relevant search tool for this assignment. Since Google provides approximately 80% of relevant results, I want to offer more places for research. I also use NovelList Plus and Biography databases, biographies and encyclopedias. Google is so easy to use that most students rely on this search engine so much.
I watched Social Networking just before this lesson. What a fascinating movie. I have to admit that I was surprised that it won the Golden Globe award for Best Picture though.
I found Alice Kedves April Fool's Day 2002 joke about the Google's PigeonRank hilarious; I always wondered how search results were accessed so fast!
Ben Koning's discussion post about how spiders crawl through the web was very informative. Colleen Nikon posted an excellent link with so much useful information that I plan to use as a teaching tool in my library classes. This site separates the information into very understandable categories to help make sense of the web.
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