Using the Internet Explorer Help File and Learning More About FTP

2nd Practical IWBIS Friday 11 October

Using the Internet Explorer Help File and learning more about FTP

1.  Startup Internet Explorer.

2.  Select Help in the Main Menu.

3.  Click on 'Contents and Index'

4.  Choose 'Index'.

5.  Find and Select 'Acessing FTP sites'

6.  Then 'To access FTP sites directly'

7.  Read the help page

8.  Try the example 'ftp://ftp.microsoft.com' and explore.

e.g. Look in the 'deskapps' folder.

Note that:

·  In the ftp site you move up and down in the folders (use the up arrow icon in the tool bar - Back and Forward do not work)

·  Each folder should have a 'Readme file to give you information about what is in the folder.

9.  Briefly check out the rest of the Index to give you an idea of the sort of help is available.

10.  Then check out the 'Contents' tab in the Help system and get an idea of sort of help available there.

Playing with search engines.

How do search engines compare?

1.  Go to http://www.google .com (using the Internet Explorer Address box)

2.  Enter your surname as search criterion and hit return.

3.  Check out

a)  how many documents are returned and

b)  what first few documents are which are returned.

(No need to open the documents - unless they look really interesting - just make a note of the number and the top 3 documents.)

4.  Now go to http://www.altavista.co.uk and do the same search on your surname. Make notes and compare the results with the previous search.

5.  Now go to http://www.yahoo.com and do the same search on your surname. Make notes and compare the results with the previous searches.

Different searches

1.  Return to www.google .com

2.  Now do another search on your surname, but this time select the 'Images' option above the search entry box. Try some other searches on images if you like. (Nothing x-rated of course) How do you think the search engine finds the images?

3.  When you have finished with Image searching, try a 'Group' search - Enter a search criterion for some subject which intereste you, e.g. 'bikes' or 'tele tubbies' or 'cinema' or even a particular film, etc.

4.  Then use the same criterion (or criteria) in the Directory search. (How are the results different here from the results from an ordinary search?)

5.  Use the same or new criteria to check out 'News' Search.

Advanced Searching

Do some more ordinary or image searching but this time use the 'Advanced Search' function to specify e.g. that you only want documents/images published on the web

a.) in the last week,

b.) in the last 24 hours

c.) in the last hour.

Learn more about Search engines

Go to http://www.lib.umt.edu/dept/hum/webmodules/module4.html and look through the pages there.

Do some of the exercises and particularly look at strategies for Boolean searches.

Check out: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

Check out: my Links: http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~tdrewry/links.htm#searchengines