- WEB SEARCHES
Introduction
- There are an estimated [billions] of webpages on the web.
If this sounds like going to the largest library in the world blind
folded you'd be not too far wrong. How do you find things?
The web is kind of chaotic, there is no nice central place where you
can go to ask for information about say dinosaurs or getting help dealing
with WINZ. Instead by learning to do a good web search you have a better
than even chance of finding something suprisingly helpful. Afterall,
of all the hundreds of millions of people on the internet, someone will
have the information you want.
- Who or what
is a search engine?
- A search engine is a website of its own, which for its own
peculier motives has decided to devote its life to surfing the web while
everyone else is literally sleeping, and keeping track of what pages
are where on what subject.
How do they do this? Well people dont do the surfing, computers do--
they just follow links from page to page around the globe. Why do they
do this? We dunno. Maybe the same reason, that anyone puts stuff on
the web. Just cause it might be useful to someone. Cool huh?
Basically they keep a giant database of the website addresses they find.
But because there are so many, and they are constantly changing, trying
to organise them into categories like dinosuars etc would be 10 lifetimes
work. So they (mostly) gave up trying to do that. Instead they let you
search their database of addresses.
-
- So how can
i do that?
- First of all you need to find a decent search engine website.
We have a link to 'Google' on our internet page because we think its
pretty good. But you can get to google from any internet connected computer
just by typing www.google.com into the
broswer address bar.
When you get to Google they have a prominant box for you to enter your
keyword search. This is one or more words about what you want to know.
Google's computer wherever it may be, in this case in America somewhere,
will then return a list of website addresses that have your keywords
in them. For this reason searching for the word the is not such a great
idea!
- Search terms
- One word on its own may not be enough--like apple. There are
just too many web pages with the word apple to them, and this means
you will have to sift through lots and lots of hits looking for what
you want. The first 2-3 words that come to your mind generally make
not bad search terms, but here are some pointers for choosing good words:
1. With Google if you include several words then ALL the words
are required to get a 'hit'. Some other search engines will match multiple
search words as meaning either OR of your words. Read the search engine's
help page if unsure.
eg: planet mars
will find stuff about the red dust and martians and not abour mars
bars
2. You can use + or and between words to force AND
type searches.
eg cars +drag
will find posts about drag cars
You can use - or not to
exclude certain matches, in case lots of the wrong thing turns up
eg jobs
-coalminer will find pages about any job but a coal miner.
3. Quoted search terms match particular phrases, and also
words like and and the.
eg: facilit
will find facilitation and facilitators, but try "facilitator"
to avoid facilities etc
eg: "raining cats and dogs"
will find exactly that phrase and not just pages with cat or dog
4. Avoid puctuation like hyphens unless quoted.
eg: try
+eco +village or "eco-village"
rather than eco-village or ecovillage
5. You can get quite fancy and say
eg (rugby or league
) and (zealand or australia)
6. If you get 1000's of matches you can either take the first
few as being the most relevent, or 'narrow' your search a bit
eg: instead of rugby,
try rugby and zealand and auckland
7. If you hardly get any hits you can broaden your search:
eg: instead of radioactive
plutonium isotope try nuclear physics
Happy searching!
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