Internet: Search and Evaluate

Two types of search sites:
Index sites provide tables of categories-- Yahoo, About, even Google (click on Directory)
Straight search engines -- Google, Alta Vista, Lycos, many more

Search techniques,
Be specific; use several words: Napoleon Russia Moscow 1812
Want Texas Rangers, the law enforcers, not the baseball team? Use the minus sign:
Texas Rangers -baseball (put a space before the minus sign)
Power Searching Use quotation marks to find a phrase "deep space nine"
Boolean searches Using AND OR and NOT in your search

Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com/
Details and comparisons of search engines:
http://searchenginewatch.com/links/major.html

Teoma.com search engine
http://www.teoma.com/
Enter a term and click Search. Then look on lower right for list of "Resources: Link collections from experts and enthusiasts." This gets you pages that have lists of links.

link: and host: features of Altavista
http://www.altavista.com
If you enter link: shorecrest.org you'll find pages that contain links that lead to shorecrest.org.
If you enter host: shorecrest.org you'll find pages that shorecrest.org contains links to.

Quick check for plagiarism:
Copy or enter distinctive phrase from a student's work, put it inside quotation marks in Google. See what comes up.
There are also subscription services like Turnitin.com, Eve, and Plagiarism.com. Some offer free trial copies you can download.

Search for images on the Internet:
Google -- click on Images -- enter key terms. Or go to Advanced Image Search to customize search in many ways.

Overture Bids Tool
http://www.overture.com/d/USm/about/sl.jhtml
Who is behind those Sponsored Links? How much are they paying?

WHOIS Lookup at Register.com
http://www.register.com/
Enter domain name -- see what variants of that domain are registered, and by whom, and what's the contact's e-mail address? Follow that to related sites.

Why would you want to look that up? Well, suppose you find a link to http://www.martinlutherking.org (what would you expect to find there?)
What kind of site is it really? Who made it? What can you find out about them from WHOIS?

Alan November -- Teaching Zack to Think
http://www.anovember.com/articles/zack.html
Zack was doing research on the Holocaust and came upon this URL:
http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/%7Eabutz/di/intro.html
which is linked to in this personal home page:
http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~abutz/index.html
Zack knew that "nwu.edu" meant the page was at Northwestern University, so he figured it was a good source.
But -- the /~abutz/ part indicates this is in a "personal subdirectory" (as would /users/abutz/ ), space made available for unofficial material, hobbies, avocations.
And the impressive-looking links on the page all refer to other pages by the same person, which is not a sign of good scholarship.
If you look up "Arthur Butz" on a search engine, you find references to "Holocaust denial" and the like.

National Archives -- Source documents and teacher plans
http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/teaching_with_documents.html
To view (as an image) an original document of Richard Nixon's:
http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/jackie_robinson/nixon_draft.html
-- and click on View Pages.
There are many other original source documents available on this site.

Reference Desk -- other types of searching
http://www.refdesk.com/

Deconstructiong a URL (Uniform Resource Locator, an Internet address)

Internet Service (Protocol) and Server
Path to Individual File on that Server

Internet Protocol

Subdomain

Registered Domain Name

Directory (Folder)

Web Page

 

 

http://

www.

shorecrest.org/

Calendar/

cal.html

 

 

 

 

Domain

Directory

Directory

Directory

Web Page

http://

pubweb.acns

nwu.edu/

~abutz/

di/

dc/

deaths.html

You can edit the URL in the Address or URL line in your browser. If a particular path doesn't work, delete parts of it. A directory usually contains a default or index page that will appear if no specific html document is specified.