Saturday 31 March 2012

Web searching & Web Resource Evaluation

A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, and other information typically located on a web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network. Software that gives a user access to the web browsers that often provide a graphical interface that lets users click buttons, icons, and menu options to view and navigate Web pages.
Search engine is a software that enables users to search the Internet using keywords. A search engine is a computer program that does the following:
1. allows user to submit a query that consists of a word /phrase
2. searches the database
3. returns a list (hits) that may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files which match the query
4. allows user to revise and resubmit query
Give examples of search engines that you know
1. Google : www.google.com ,
2. Yahoo! Search : search.yahoo.com
3. AltaVista : http://www.altavista.com/
4. Ask.com: www.ask.com etc!
Computer software program designed to help users of the
Internet locate information on the World Wide Web. It collects and indexes Internet resources ( Web pages, Usenet. Newsgroups, programs, images, etc. )and provides a keyword search system allowing the user to identify and retrieve resources. There are many search engines available and each is different in their scope, search protocols, and appearance. Some common search engines are: Alta Vista, Google, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, and HotBot. Directories built by human selection not by computers or robot programs, organized into subject categories, classification of pages by subjects , subjects not standardized and vary according to the scope of each directory. NEVER contain full‐text of the web pages they link to ‐‐ you can only search what you can see (titles, descriptions, subject categories, etc.) ‐use broad or general terms, small and specialized to large, but smaller than most search engines, huge range in size and often carefully evaluated and annotated.
Subjects
– Google Directory : directory.google.com
– Yahoo! : dir.yahoo.com
– Librarians' Index : www.lii.org
– Infomine : infomine.ucr.edu
– Academic Info : www.academicinfo.us
 Metasearch function to search more than one search engine and/or subject directory at once and then compile the results in a sometimes convenient display, sometimes consolidating all the results into a uniform format and listing.
E.g. :
• Dogpile : www.dogpile.com
• Metacrawler
• Tripleme
Identify key concepts, synonyms, and variant word forms in your search topic.
– Use phrase
• More than one KEYWORD, searched exactly as keyed (all terms required to be in documents, in the order keyed). Enclosing keywords in quotations " " forms a phrase in Google, and some other search tools.
Web research:
Audience, General public; children to senior citizens; knowledgeable layperson; scholars; anyone
Coverage:Popular topics; personal information; current affairs; government information; research; scholarly information; fun and games; and more.
Written By: Anyone: professional journalists; children; teenagers (high school students); members of general public; scholars and researchers; poets and writers of fiction; essayists; college students; advocates and activists; and more...
Timeliness:
Varies wildly: may be very current coverage or very out‐ofdate information, or undated. Length:Can vary greatly.
Content:
Anything: general discussion; editorial opinion; graphics; photographs; advertisements; statistical analysis; detailed analysis; fact; fiction; fraud; and more...
Slant: Depends: May reflect the editorial bias / slant of the web page creator; may be objective or neutral; may be geared for academic or professional audiences; may be unsupported personal opinion.
Rationale
– Web coverage often differs from print coverage.
– Frequently, it's difficult to determine the extent of coverage of a topic from a web page. The page may or may not include links to other web pages or print references.
– Sometimes web information is "just for fun", a hoax, someone's personal expression that may be of interest to no one, or even outright silliness.