WEB SEARCH

                                                                                                                                

It’s true that the status of current situation and abilities can be measured only when encountered with another new set of information or scenerio. Similarly, I thought I knew enough and was confident with the lesson WEB SEARCH but how wrong it turned out to be.

Till I learnt this lesson, I always had typed the key words in the address bar, searched and chose the most appropriate web page that popped up. It was very helpful but later with the lesson from our tutor, I came to know that it was only a basic search. The Advanced Search tools were of immense help. There were basically five search tools that are;

      BOOLEAN OPERATORS,

      TRUNCATION,

      WILDCARDS,

      RESTRICTING SEARCH USING SITE, and

      RESTRICTING SEARCH BY FORMATS

Boolean operators;

The Boolean operators are AND, OR, NOT. They form the basis of mathematical sets and database logic. These words connect our search words together and narrow down or broaden the search. This operator is mainly used when the topic contains multiple search items. We also use them to connect various pieces of information to find exactly what we are looking for.  For instance, when we want to find a book about certain topic by a particular author, we can type “Title AND Author AND Year” and then tap the search button.

AND is used to narrow down the search by typing all the key words that must be there. Eg. “GNH AND Bhutan”

 OR is used to broaden our search by writing two or more synonymes. This will ensure the search on any one of the topics. Eg. “cloning OR genetics OR Reproduction”

NOT also helps us in narrowing our search by excluding the content that we do not want to be included.  Eg. “Cloning NOT sheep”

Truncation;

It is also known as stemming. It is a technique to broaden our search to include various word  endings and spellings. We need to type the root word and insert truncation symbol (*, !, ? or #) and then search. Eg. “child*”

Wildcards;

This search tool is similar to truncation but here the symbol substitutes for one letter of a word. We use this tool when we have words that are spelled differently but mean the same thing.

Eg. “colo?r”    

Restricting search using site;

Using the site operator to search for information from a particular location on the web helps in narrowing down our search. Eg. Typing “org, bt, gov, com…” in the url

Restricting search by formats;

Another way of narrowing down the search and saving time is by restricting with file formats. Type the type of file that we are looking for will reduce our search task to a great deal. Eg. “pdf, htm, xls,docs, ppt,…

These search tools were very helpful in obtaining the desired information from the internet which has a sea of information within short span of time. The follow up activities on finding educational websites srtengthened my newly acquired information.

Given the busy schedule of teachers, I think this will be of great help as we can save our time while surfing the net either for professional purpose or pleasure.