2. What is a search engine?
A search engine is a database system designed
to index and categorize internet addresses,
otherwise known as URLs (for example,
http://www.submittoday.com).
6. How to search
• Short and simple
• Be aware of word order "song bird"-"bird song"
• Capitalisation does not matter
• Be specific
• Stop words excluded (the, and, is, because )
10. Videos
Web search - Strategies in plain English:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rESpZFGgFsY
How search works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs
Editor's Notes
When using a search engine such as Google or Bing to search the web, the search engine is not really searching the entire web. Instead, the search engine creates its own constantly updated list of sites, called an index.
Search engines use automated software programs called "spiders" to search through all the pages stored on the World Wide Web. These spiders visit web page after web page, and copy all the content into their own database - the index.
"Which lake in Russia has the clearest water?" A conventional search engine will match that to documents containing the keywords "lake", "Russia", "clearest" and "water", which may result in useful results purely by accident - or it may not. Keywords filtered.
1. Leave out unnecessary words. 2. "Song bird"- look for a song that mentions "bird" "Bird song"- might find a page on various sounds made by birds. 3. Same results whether you use capital letters or not. 4. If your search term has commonly used words you are less likely to have success than if you are more specific. 5. Common English words that are automatically excluded from the search by the search engine.
