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Course Overview

Session 1

What is the Internet?

Internet vs other information resources

Finding a 'knowledge hub'

Search engines

- How they work
 - Comparing engines
- Using Top Three sites

Search strategies

Offline Assignment 1

Session 2

Evaluating information
Researching companies
Researching markets
Researching countries
Researching news
Search software
Offline Assignment 2

Assignments from Session 1

Example Sites

Be sure that you have looked through all the example sites used in the first session. You can find a simple list of all the sites mentioned in each section in the table below:

Knowledge Hubs
Internet Search Strategies


 

Exercises

Did you manage to finish all the exercises? If not you can quickly return to any exercise using the table below:

 
Exercise Number 1: Read and navigate a Web page: in five minutes or less!
Exercise Number 2: Head-to-Head on Snowboards

Exercise Number 3: Finding a Knowledge Hub

Exercise Number 4: Using Different Search Syntax
Exercise Number 5: Metasearch vs Searching With a Single Engine
Exercise Number 6: Search Engines Compared

Exercise Number 7: Hunting and Harvesting

Further Reading

1. Choose the Best Search for Your Information Needs
A really useful table with suggestions for the best search engine for a variety of needs. On the left is a column with your 'information need' and on the right is a column with a suitable search engine.

2. Site Search Tools Glossary
An excellent, concise and fairly up-to-date glossary of search engine terms. Cross-referenced internally and with external links to other, useful documents, this is an excellent resource.

3. Meta Search Engines
Although almost a year old - a long time in Internet terms - this article is nevertheless a good and fairly thorough introduction to meta search engines. It looks at how they work, how they differ from standard search engines, and some of their strengths and weaknesses. It also includes a good set of examples to try.

4. How to Do Field Searching in Web Search Engines: A Field Trip
Learn how to search using fields. Have you ever wanted to search using criteria such as 'date', 'title', 'URL' or 'language'? This article explains which search engines offer these services and shows you how to use them. Although not terribly recent, the information here is relevant and helpful.

5. How Search Engines Rank Web Pages
This short article helps explain how search engines cope with our search queries, and how they rank the matching results. It's a good introduction to what is actually a very complicated subject.

 

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