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Searching The
Internet: Part I
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October 20,
1998
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In the
Industrial Age, we mined our raw materials from
quarries and forests. In the Information Age, our
quarries will be the networks where information raw
materials are storied. Although stone quarries will
not disappear, most people will be using
information as a raw material and building
information products from the building blocks that
they mine from the networks -- the Internet.
In the
Industrial Age, we had a few experts and lots of
quarry workers. In the Information Age, everyone
will have to be an information geologist, able to
explore, examine, and plan just how to find the
right information ores for their particular tasks.
This and the next two issues of NetSA will discuss
some techniques for finding information raw
materials on the Internet. These techniques will be
important to you as school and LEA administrators,
important for your teachers as they mine for new
and up-to-date teaching resources on the Internet,
and to your students as they prepare to become
lifelong learners.
There is a
great deal of talk today about distance learning,
college and continuing education courses that are
taught over the Internet. I am not yet convinced
that the web can replace the classroom. However, I
am convinced that people will be learning and
growing personally and professionally over the
Internet. I believe that most of these learning
experiences will be more casual and "just in time"
by nature, and that they will require the learner
to be able to "mine" the Internet for the
information and experiences they need.
Today, I'm
going to briefly describe three tools that are
available to you as you search for information on
the Internet. Next week we will learn how to talk
to search engines through the Boolean language. The
week after that, we will learn the process for
searching the Internet using, a model called
S.E.A.R.C.H.
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Internet Searching Tools:
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There are
three major search tools available to you as you
look for information resources on the Internet.
Each has its own unique strengths and
weaknesses.
1.
Topic Oriented Directories
These tools are hierarchically
structured directories of web pages and other
information resources on the Internet. You begin
with a fairly broad list of subjects: art,
business, computers, games, health, home, news,
recreation, reference, regional, etc. You select
and click the subject that comes closest to helping
you solve your problem and are presented with a
list of topics that fall under your selected
subject. For instance, when I click "Reference"
using the NewHoo topic directory
(http://www.newhoo.com), Education is one of the
topics that I receive. Next I click "Education" and
receive a large number of subtopics which include:
art education, continued education, distance
learning, education reform, educational news, home
schooling, special education, technology,
etc.
In essence
we are browsing through a topic tree, logically
seeking our information solutions. When I click
"Education Reform" I receive a list of five
Internet websites, each of which deal with
education reform. This is the major advantage of
Topic directories, that when you finally click on
the topic you seek, you will get a very short but
condensed list of Internet resources. The list is
condensed in that all of the hits are relevant to
the selected topic. As a comparison, when I typed
"education reform" into HotBot
(http://www.hotbot.com) a very large search engine,
I received 233,447 matches, many of which have
little to do with improving learning.
The biggest
disadvantage of the topic directory is that they
are largely built be people, web builders who have
registered their web resources onto the directory.
Therefore, there will be many resources out there
that will not show up on any of the topic
directories, valuable information that you will
miss if you rely exclusively on topic
directories.
Here
are just a few Topic Oriented
Directories:
Yahoo -- http://www.yahoo.com
Galaxy -- http://galaxy.einet.net
NewHoo -- http://www.newhoo.com
Netscape Netcenter -- http://home.netscape.com
Internet Start -- http://home.microsoft.com
LookSmart -- http://www.looksmart.com
Snap -- http://www.snap.com
Apali (Spanish) -- http://www.apali.com
Education Related Topic
Directories:
Link-O-Rama http://www.gsn.org/links/_cfm/links.cfm
G.R.A.D.E.S. http://www.classroom.net/Grades/
Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators http://www.capecod.net/schrockguide/
Landmarks for Schools http://www.landmark-project.com/
Planet K-12 http://planetk-12.planetsearch.com/
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2.
Search Engines
Search engines are like topic
oriented directories in that they have a database
or index that represents their knowledge of what is
available on the Internet. They also have a web
page through which we operate the tool. The major
difference between topic directories and search
engines is in how they build their
databases.
Search
engines employ what's called "spiders" or
"crawlers." These are small computer programs that
wander around on the Internet looking for new
information. They are like digital robots that move
to places with which they are already familiar,
looking for what has changed. When they find
changes, new information resources, they collect
the data and scurry back to their search engine and
add the information to the database. Consequently,
the database grows automatically, and they are
typically enormous in size, usually holding
information on more than a hundred million web
pages.
Search
engines are also searched rather than browsed. You
tell the search engine what you are looking for and
it tells you what it knows about. This is where
some skill is required. You search engine is your
information assistant, and the degree to which it
is able to help you depends on the degree to which
you are able to communicate your needs. This
requires a language called Boolean. We will explore
this concept in next week's NetSA.
The
advantage of the search engine is its size. The
major tools represent significant portions of the
Internet meaning that you will receive links to
many resources that did not appear in a topic
directory browse. This is also the disadvantage of
search engines. Instead of 5 pages on Education
Reform, we got over two-hundred thousand pages with
HotBot. Describing to the search engine exactly
what you want to find is a skill that must be honed
with experience.
Here
are some search engines:
Alta Vista http://www.altavista.digital.com
Excite http://www.excite.com
HotBot http://www.hotbot.com
Infoseek http://www.infoseek.com
Lycos http://www.lycos.com
Meta
Search Engines (search engines that search other
search engines)
MetaCrawler http://www.metacrawler.com
DogPile http://www.dogpile.com
Highway 61 http://highway61.com
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3.
Net-Smarts
This search tool is not really
a computer tool. It is a growing sense of being
"net-wise." As you gain more experience in using
and searching the Internet, you will have an
increasing sense of the best first place to go to
find the information that you seek.
Searching
the Internet is very much like being a detective.
You are investigating a digital world, looking for
clues, drawing conclusions, and finding answers. It
involves asking questions.
- Why
would someone publish this information on the
Internet?
- What
type of organization would publish this
information?
- What
kind of server would it be on: commercial,
educational, government?
- What
other information would likely appear on a page
with the information that you seek?
I did a
workshop a few months ago on advanced Internet
search strategies. A few days later I received an
e-mail message from one of the participants of the
workshop, a media specialist. She explained that
one of her students was looking for information on
the physical therapy program at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She had tried the
specific techniques that I had taught without
success. After reading the e-mail, I asked the
question, "Where would someone publish information
about the physical therapy program at UNC." As you
have already figured out, the UNC website.
On the UNC
website (http://www.unc.edu), they have a small
search tool for searching all UNC web pages. I
typed in "physical therapy" and received a list of
17 web pages that mentioned the term, fifteen from
the School of Medicine and two from the English
Department (don't ask!). Then I e-mailed the
results and strategy back to the media specialist.
The last
installment of this series of articles on searching
the Internet will describe a process for conducting
Internet searches. It is effective and the model is
also easy to teach to other people. However, it is
not a magic button. There is no one way to mine the
Internet. It comes from effective processes,
problem-solving skills, and experience, and it is
fun.
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Note: Much of the
content of this issue comes directly from
the new book...
Raw Materials for the Mind: Teaching &
Learning in
Information & technology Rich
Schools
by David Warlick
ISBN 0-9667432-0-2
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