Homework for 10/26/10

Here’s the exercise we did in class today and the homework for next Tuesday (10/26).

In Class Exercise — Advanced Internet Searching:

• Search for information on your topic on the internet (not anywhere else!)
• Use the search engines, portals, resources and advanced search strategies discussed in the reading (Badke Ch 6 and the Common Craft video) and in class today (Internet Public Library, Google Books, Google Scholar)
• Try a variety of strategies

Blog Homework — Research Journal Post:

• In class today you tried out advanced search strategies and scholarly internet resources from the Badke reading to search for sources on your research topic.
• Write at least 100 words about 1 advanced strategy or scholarly resource you used to search the free internet.
• Did you find different information sources than you found doing a regular internet search (just using standard Google, Yahoo, etc.), and if so, how are they different?
• Did you encounter any difficulties that you haven’t encountered in a regular internet search?

Remember that if you are using the Advanced Search on Google or other search engines, you must enter additional information into the fields. For example, you may wish to limit your search to a specific date range, or to .edu or .gov websites.

Class notes 10/7/10

In class we discussed search mechanics: databases, search engines and a bit on search strategies (we will spend more time on this in the coming weeks).

• How Google Works is a short video by Google which works well with the content of the Liddy article: http://www.google.com/howgoogleworks/.

• This image may also be useful for understanding how Google searches the internet: http://ppcblog.com/how-google-works/

• Yippy is a clustering search engine (mentioned in Badke Ch. 4 as Clusty): http://www.yippy.com

• Quintura bills itself as a visual search engine: http://quintura.com/

• Searching the library catalog from the Queens Public Library returns 3 kinds of results: a visual depiction of subject headings (like Quintura), the list of books/other media themselves, and a list of subject headings, formats, dates, etc. (similar to Clusty): http://queenslibrary.org/

• During our searching session in class, Richard found a search engine called Zuula that aggregates results from many search engines, including Google, Yahoo, etc.: http://zuula.com/

Here are the powerpoint notes from the first part of the class: LIB1201_1007 (PDF)