2013-04-09-Internet Searching
Seminars@Hadley
Simplifying Internet Searches
Presented by
Amy Salmon
Sue Melrose
Moderated by
Doug Anzlovar
May 6, 2013
Doug Anzlovar
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name again is Doug Anzlovar and I am the Dean of Educational Programs and Instruction here at the Hadley School. Today’s Hadley topic is Simplifying Internet Searching.
Now let me welcome today’s presenter, Amy Salmon. Amy has been an instructor here at Hadley for over six years and is passionate about using and teaching technology. She is currently teaching several of Hadley’s Technology and Entrepreneurship Employment courses. During today’s seminar Amy will explain the differences between Internet browsers and search engines, identify the most accessible search engines, and demonstrate how to use Boolean operators and other techniques to improve your Internet searches.
Also joining Amy is Sue Melrose, and Sue is one of our teachers who teaches the Internet courses and we have asked her to join us in the room to add to the seminar experience for all of you. I’m going to go ahead and turn the microphone over to Amy, and we will get underway.
Amy Salmon
I want to say welcome to everyone and thank you very much for being with us today to learn more about Internet searching. I see several of my current and past students in the room, and I thank you for joining us and I look forward to hopefully answering any of your questions at the end of today’s seminar.
Before I start into actually the topic of Internet searching, I want to pose a question to all of you. I would like you all to give some thought to an Internet search or something you would like to search for on the Internet and in four words or less type in the text chat area of today’s room by pressing the F8 key. Type your search words in and press enter. When I’m finished with my formal presentation today, our moderator Dean Doug Anzlovar will review all of your entries in the text chat area and he’ll give me one of his suggestions and will actually do a search using one of your search criterian. So keep that in mind and text chat into the room when you’ve got your idea down, but keep in mind that I want less than four words. Okay? All right, here is a common question I’ve gotten over 15 years of teaching and using the Internet myself: what’s the difference between an Internet browser and a search engine?
Well, an Internet browser is actually a program that is installed on your computer. It is used for retrieving, navigating, and accessing information on the World Wide Web. An information resource, or what we call an information resource on the World Wide Web is identified as a unified resource identifier or URI, and this could be a webpage, an image, or video, or other information available on the World Wide Web. I’m going to list some of the most popular and common Internet browsers. Remember, these are programs on your computer, that would be used on your computer on your PC. First, a little history.
The first Internet browser ever created was actually called the World Wide Web, all one word. It was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1990s. The next Internet browser that became popular was called Mosaic, which was then renamed Netscape and then renamed Netscape Navigator and is today known as Mozilla Firefox. Internet Explorer is Microsoft’s Internet browser. Opera is another Internet browser that, although only having 2% of the actual browser market, is actually fairly popular among users who are visually impaired and mobile users.
Google Chrome, which is Google’s Internet browser - it’s just called Chrome but it is made by Google. On the Mac computers, Safari and Firefox or Mozilla Firefox are your Internet browsers. For mobile devices, for those of you who are iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch junkies like myself, and also Android and other devices, your Internet browser on those devices is Safari for your i-devices; so Safari is your Internet browser for your iPhone, iPad and your iPod Touch. Chrome is available for Android, which is the Google operating system, and it’s also available for IOS, for your i-devices. Firefox is available for Android and Nokia devices. Internet Explorer Mobile for Windows Mobile and Windows phones. Blackberry has its own browser called BlackBerry. And then there’s the Kindle basic web. Opera also has a mobile device or mobile Internet browser, and there are numerous other Internet browsers.
I’m only listing the ones that are the most popular and that garrner the biggest market share right now. Okay, so we now know what an Internet browser is: it’s a program that runs on our computer. Right? Because it gives us access to the World Wide Web. So, what is a search engine? A search engine is a tool for accessing information on the World Wide Web through your Internet browser. The two most popular types of search tools today are search engines and online directories. Search engines allow you to search for specific information on the World Wide Web using keywords to describe the information you’re looking for. The result is a list of links, or results, that hopefully match what you were looking for. In ranking pages, search engines have to follow certain criteria. These are simply programs that are going out and searching for information on the World Wide Web based on the keywords and criteria you gave it. I always love it when students call and say, “Google isn’t doing what I told it to do. It’s giving me the wrong search results.” Well, the truth is Google can’t give you the wrong search results, it’s up to you to enter the search words in properly first. If you don’t enter the search words in correctly, then you’re not going to get the right search results.
The rules or criteria that search engines use for gathering the results based on your search words differs. So it’s going to differ between the different search engines, and I’m going to go through the most popular search engines in a minute. Typically, they put the most relevant websites or results - keep in mind a result may not be a website, it could be an image, it could be a YouTube video - but typically they’re going to put the most relevant result at the top of the search results. How do they do this? They look for the location and frequency of keywords. And you’re going to hear me say this a lot in today’s seminar.
So, they’re looking for keywords, and they’re looking for keywords in the content of the webpage or element; they’re also looking for those keywords in the title of the webpage, which is that text that appears in the blue part of your Internet browser at the very top. Or, if you’re a screen reader user, if you do insert T for JAWS and NVDA or control shift T for Windowize, it’s what announces the webpage that you are currently on. That’s the title. Headers and text near the top of the webpage are also used to pull when doing a keyword search. Ironically, some websites are pulling at a higher rate, depending on the number of links they actually have on their webpage. Some websites that have more links are going to pull at a higher percentage than others that don’t.
A classified listing of websites is called a directory. These are webpages that are reviewed by actual human beings and put together into a directory for you to then access and look at and search by subject for category or keywords. So you can go from general to specific in an online directory - so keep in mind, we talked about search engines, now we’re talking about online directories, a different method for searching information on the Internet. However, in today’s World Wide Web world, the term search engine and directories are often interchanged or interrelated. It used to be, a couple of years ago, that you actually had to go to a specific online directory site in order to look up information in that online directory.
Again, I’m going to repeat myself here, but an online directory is a compilation of websites and resources on the World Wide Web that have been reviewed by actual human beings, whereas a search engine is just going to search based on your keywords for any instance of those keywords appearing on the World Wide Web and those results may be websites, images, they may be websites that are no longer valid. So there’s the main difference there, but also keep in mind that online directories are only going to provide the result of websites that have been reviewed by human beings. So, if they haven’t reviewed the website, it’s not going to appear in their online directory.
So, when do you use a search engine over an online directory? Most of you would say “Hey, I’m just going to use an online directory. Its been done by humans, we know it’s going to be accurate.” Online directories are great for general searches, it will give you great results on popular topics or subjects. If you’re looking for a particular interest, say you’re doing research for education, or say you’re in business. A lot of my students are entrepreneurs. Say you’re looking up market research for your small business. An online directory might be a great resource to research who your competitors are in that industry or business, or locally who are your competitors and also to provide other information on your business and your industry.
Some examples of online directories. I’ll back up here: when would you use a search engine then? A search engine is for when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for or you don’t know exactly where to look. Online directories are great if you know what you are looking for and you know where to look. Search engines are a better solution if you’re not sure where you’re looking, or what you’re looking for, or where to go. Some of the top online directories, and I have checked these out myself, they work fairly well with screen readers - I can’t verify that they’re going to work 100% for screen magnification users - but if you’ve got speech with your screen magnification, then you should be able to access information.
Yahoo directory is one site that’s highly used and very popular, and it’s actually - this is where the difference between a search engine and an online directory kind of mesh because Yahoo and Google have kind of married online directory services with their search engines. And I will be providing a resource document with the audio recording of this seminar that will list all the websites listed in today’s seminar. So please don’t worry about jotting down websites or asking for addresses, I’ll be able to give it to with the resource document. About.com is another great online directory. ODP, or what stands for Open Directory Project is a really great one that I just recently found and has some wonderful results for an online directory with providing general categories and subject areas and subcategories and subsections under those.
Other online directories that some of you may already be familiar with include the White Pages. That’s an online directory, something that’s already been reviewed by human beings, and has been what we call validated. So, White Pages, Yellow Pages, Yellow Book, are online directories. One that I know some people use when they’re trying to look up somebody, they might do a reverse phone number or reverse lookup, that would be an online directory. InfoSpace is another one that a lot of people use. Just keep in mind that when accessing and using online directories that not all online directories are free. Some require you to pay to use their service and that fee can range anywhere from $2-$400. So, make sure you check before you “sign on the dotted line” with some of these online directories.
What are our top search engines? So, we’ve covered our top online directories. Now, what are her top search engines? Everybody knows Google: they say “Go Google this.” How many of us have heard us say that expression? Google is a wonderful tool as a search engine for searching liberal arts and engineering topics, it has expanded in last couple of years to be a little broader than it used to be, but I think that people think Google is the only search engine. It’s not, and you’ll find out in a minute. But from the Google search page here’s a few things you can do: you can check the latest news, today’s top news.
For example, I just recently looked and read about the horrible incidents that just happened in Houston, Texas just before I came in the seminar room. You can get maps or directions by going to Google Maps just after the Google search page. You can log into your Gmail account there. You can go directly to YouTube. Another great search engine today is Yahoo and it is very accessible, however it is a fairly cluttered page with a lot of information being presented on that one page, so if you’re going to use Yahoo at Yahoo.com for the search, make sure you’re using all of your screen reader Internet text navigation or Internet navigation tips and tricks and tools. Navigate by heading using the H key for most screen readers, and jump directly to the search edit box by using a form control quick key for going to the edit box with E.
Right off the Yahoo main page, you can check your stock, if you’re looking for company stock. There is actually a search field type in the company name and it will pull up the stock results immediately for that company. You can check your favorite sports team scores right there from the main Yahoo page. Search videos, and following right on the Yahoo page is local news. So, say you’re navigating using the Yahoo page, using your quick keys like H and jump down by heading, you’re actually going to get to the top news stories for today very quickly right off that main Yahoo page where it says Google, you actually have to select the link to get to that. Ask.com is another great search engine.