2. Where do you go?
Are you happy with the results?
Whatdo you think makes the searching
experience work well?
3. Google – 65%
Yahoo! – 19%
Bing – 9%
Ask.com – 2% and Ask Kids
Ixquick
Clusty
Librarians’ Internet Index
Google Directory
http://infopeople.org/search/chart.html
4. Searchengines use software (“robots” or
“spiders”) to index some amount of Web pages
• Proprietary algorithms
• Google claims over a trillion URLs searched
• Paid placement of ads provides revenue
• Currency – how frequently do they add sites?
Other
tools add human-collected or human-
submitted sites (Google and Yahoo directories)
• These are then searched by subject or keyword
• Tend to be smaller in size
Relevance ranking of results
5. AKA the “Deep Web”
Resourcesthat are not indexed by search
engines (such as library databases)
InfoMINE– indexes free-standing
databases
Add
term “database” to your topic in
Google or Yahoo
6. Scholarly information subset of Google:
http://scholar.google.com
Many journal articles included on publisher’s web sites
Set up “Scholar Preferences” Library Links enter
“OhioLINK” and click to check the box
Look for “Find it with OLinks” or “OhioLINK OLinks”
links in results
7. Online encyclopedia of over 3 million
articles
Built
using a wiki – allows for multiple
contributors
How does it work?
What are the cautions?
8. 1. Identify the important concepts
2. Choose keywords
3. Pick synonyms and related terms
4. Think about using quotes, truncation, Boolean
5. Choose a search engine
6. Read the instructions (most rules are the same, but not all)
7. Enter your search expression
8. Evaluate the results
9. Modify/narrow your search (if needed)
10. Move to a new search engine (if needed)
9. Crucial because of fluidity/lack of standards
Some possible criteria for any source:
• Who wrote or created the source?
• What audience was the source written for?
• Where did you (or can you) find the source?
• When was the source written or created?
• Why was the source written?
• How can you verify the information contained in
the source?
Look carefully at URL (.com, .edu, etc.)