webhound leader's guide:
Activity Sequence
Searching with Engines

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Materials

• Webhound guide (print version)
• Searching with Engines worksheet
• Multimedia Computer connected to Internet
• Web browser software
• Whiteboard, flipchart, or other means to write text for the participants can see

Approximate Time

This section should take around 20 minutes.

Procedures

1. Tell the participants that in this lesson they will learn to use some of the tools that can search portions of the Internet (remember that we said you could not really search it all). Usually, you type your keywords into a field and click a button to start the search program. The webhound provides links to a handful of them-- if you want to try some more you can refer to the location at Yahoo that lists search engines.

If you think about the previous lesson, these are good starting points to finding other search sites!

2. Introduce the participants to the concept that "robots" or computer programs, are written to explore web sites and return what they find to a host computer in the form of a large database. When you visit a search site, you are really searching the results from the last time their robot program "walked" the web. There is no guarantee that the robot traversed every corner of the web.
   
   
3. Discuss some of the general differences you might find in using a search engine.

   Look at how much information is returned from a search-- if it is just the title of a site, you have to guess if the title matches what you are looking for. Other sites will return short descriptions.
   
   Another thing to look at is how fast the results come in. While this can depend on the time of day and the amount of other users, some sites in general are more responsive because of better equipment and Internet connection speed.
   
   Some sites rank the returns in the order of "relevance". Note that this usually means how often the keywords that you enter occur in the document.
   
   Another features include the ability to construct more complex search criteria ("Power Search") and to re-submit a search to find results similar to the last search

4. There are many different kinds of search tools out there. With some topics, you do not have to do a wide web search there are existing sites that search for that specific type of information. Tell the participants to look at the Scoping Your Search worksheet at the section where they described the nature of the search.

   Some sets are set up to conduct searches for specific types of information. For example, if you are looking for information that pertains to a geographic region, try city.net. In our example, we may be able to look under countries and then under Egypt to find sites that have information just about that country.
   
   If you were looking for some inexpensive software that we could download, you should search the site at shareware.com.

5. A "Meta"- Search site has an interface that has organized links to several to many different web sites. These sites to not add any feature beyond organizng the interfaces into one convenient location. You still must enter the same keywords into different parts of the interface.
   
   
6. A few sites are set up where from one page, you can enter the keywords, and it sends the request to several different other search engines. One of the better ones is known as "Savvy Search"

   Although it may take longer than other sites, the results from Savvy Search are neatly organized.

   The example in the webhound guide can be demonstrated at this point.
   
   
7. Another kind of search site is one that searches an extremely large amount of information. These are places that are always increasing the capacity of their search system and offer a wide array of power search options.
   
   
8. "Power Search" options allow you to make your searches more specific. Unfortunately, the way they work may be different from one site to another. Describe or demonstrate some of the examples shown in the webhound guide.

   You can narrow a search by having it search for an exact phrase rather than a series of keywords.
   
   You can target your search by using "boolean" or logical expressions to join keywords. There may be other options to tell the search program to count the results where two words are close to each other (proximity search)

9. Tell the participants to spend 15 minutes trying the different search engines an recording their results in the chart in the worksheet for this lesson. You may choose to demonstrate a search using the listed examples.
   
   
10. Ask the participants to answer the questions listed under the heading Look at where you are... You may have them answer aloud, write down their answers, or share with a neighbor.

    Can you explain to a friend or colleague how a web "robot" works?
    A robot is a computer program written to periodically explore as many web sites as it can find. It follows every link it can from every web page it comes across and returns the results to a searchable database.
    
    As you explored the different search engines, did you find different results for the same search terms?
    There should be similarities and differences in the results because the sites build their databases differently.
    
    Which engine seemed to produce the information in the useful format? Which one(s) were the quickest responding?
    Excite is very useful because of its descriptions and ranked relevancy listing. Alta Vista is one of the most comprehensive and fastest.
    
    How do you do a "power" search?
    Put phrases in quotes. Use logical expressions such as AND, OR, NOT. Look for details at each site as they way you enter the power search criteria can differ

NEXT:

This is the end of the workshop. Have the participants fill out the Survey