SCEN103 Orientation to Web Searching

Orientation to Web Searching

Alta Vista	http://www.altavista.com/	Yahoo!	http://www.yahoo.com/search.html
Excite	http://www.excite.com/	HotBot	http://www.hotbot.com/
Magellan	http://www.mckinley.com/	WebCrawler	http://www.webcrawler.com/
Lycos	http://www.lycos.com/	Infoseek	http://www.infoseek.com/

Exercise 1
Try four of the web search tools in turn to find information about SCEN103. Rate them in their effectiveness (number of pages found, speed of access, speed of search, priority of results) in finding the SCEN103 homepage. Choose from poor, good, excellent.

Search Tool	Speed of Access to Search Site	Speed of Search	Number of Hits	Priority of Hits

Exercise 2
Use one or two of the effective search engines to find two websites devoted to a general topics in which you are interested. Note that websites devoted to the topic are better for this exercise than individual pages.

Report the location of each website, also known as URLs or links, that you found as a result of searching the Internet. The Netsite: appears in the window under the toolbar.

Topic:_________________________

Location 1: http://_____________________________________________

Location 2: http://_____________________________________________

(It's possible that http may not be the type of transfer protocol that you find; for example, you may have arrived via gopher. If http does not appear as part of the URL, the "Uniform Resource Locator," scratch out http above and write the correct protocol.)

Exercise 3
Evaluate the two websites using the following criteria using a poor/good/excellent/ scale. The criteria are from Teaching Undergrads Web Evaluation.

Website	Accuracy	Authority	Objectivity	Currency	Coverage

Name:_________________________________________

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Comments, suggestions, or requests to ghw@udel.edu.

"http://www.physics.udel.edu/~watson/scen103/99s/websearch.html"
Last updated Feb. 19, 1999.
Copyright George Watson, Univ. of Delaware, 1999.