Information Literacy (LIBR 2100)

What are search engines?

• Online search tools, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Duck Duck Go.

What will you find?

• Results will be web pages – commercial, academic, or user-generated.

• Results will be ranked (ordered) based on many factors, like page views, link counts, best match, your location, and even your previous browsing data.

• Many search engines will also show advertisements in the list of results.

Pros

• May tailor results to you based on your browsing history, so you are more likely to find relevant and local information.

• Quick and easy access to information.

Cons

• Must be very critical of results to make sure they are reliable.

• The best results may not always be on the first page, depending on how results are ranked.

• Difficult to find scholarly sources through web searches.

Once you understand how search engines work you can develop strategies to help tease out the information you want to find.

1. Be Specific
   • Since search engines index textual content, think about the words and phrases that might occur on the pages you want to find. Use these terms in your search
     • Sample search: Effects of play on learning and development
        
2. Specify exact phrases, concepts, professional terms, key researchers using quotations " ".
   • With quotations the exact words in the exact order are searched. Without the quotations, search engines will look for words in any order and location.
      
   • When quotations are used with a single word, it ensures that one word must appear in the results. In some other search engines this is done with a + sign. In Google the + sign is used for Google Plus pages.
     • Sample searches: "symbolic play" "Vygotsky" "curriculum"
        
3. Using search operators OR, NOT, AROUND
   • AND is automatically assumed between and 2 words so entering it is not required. However, AROUND (capitalized) will increase the proximity of 2 words in the search results, but it can drastically reduce your results. Use with caution.
      
   • OR can be used to find pages that might use one of several words, e.g. teenagers OR adolescents. OR must be capitalized. Lower case 'or' does not have the same effect. Google and many other search engines also look for synonyms of your search term so the full impact of OR is not always obvious.
      
   • The minus - sign is the NOT operator. When you use a dash before a word or site, it excludes sites with that info from your results. This is useful for words with multiple meanings, like Apple the company and apple the fruit.
      
4. Use the Google limits

   • Web page title: your search term must be in the title of the page
     intitle:play
     allintitle:  "social play" children

   • Website or domain: you can specify on particular website to search
     site:ualberta.ca children's play

   • File type: you can specify the file format. Using PPT (powerpoint format) will help find presentations. Using PDF will help find reports and articles.
     filetype:pdf site:org “social play”
     filetype:ppt site:edu  children “play activities”

All of these options are available on the Google Advanced Search page:

Google shows scholarly results first for this search – these are likely similar to results that would show on Google Scholar.

Google also gives image, video, and news results for your search, which may give other interesting information.

Many of these results are from organizations and companies – be sure to carefully review any facts and evaluate the websites to make sure you are getting credible information.

Searching using natural language works well.

Bing shows ad results on this side bar and in the top of the regular search results – watch for this to make sure information is reliable.

These related searches may contain other useful keywords to use to find more information.

An About Us section on a website can help you to determine if the organization is credible.

BEFORE you search:

Google “Crawls” pages on the public web
Copies text & images, builds  a database

WHEN you search:

Google automatically ranks pages in your results through algorithms

• 200 factors in all!
• Word occurrence and location on page
• Popularity: looks both at how many pages link, AND the quality of the page which is providing the links.

Search Engine Optimization

Google and Bing favour websites that meet search engine algorithms. Pages that do not meet the criteria will not be easily found by search engines, but this does not mean they do not have useful information.

In her book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Noble delves into the ways search engines misrepresent a variety of people, concepts, types of information and knowledge. Her aim: to get people thinking and talking about the prominent role technology plays in shaping our lives and our future.

Transcript available on YouTube site.

In this video Eli Pariser explains how Google personalizes your results and how this affects your Google searches.

Note: Most web browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) will have an Incognito or Private Browsing mode, which can be used to prevent your browsing history, location, and previous searches from influencing your results when using tools like Google. Private browsing does not save your search history locally on your computer, but it often can still be accessed through other means, like the server or your IP address.

TED. (2011, May 2). Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles" [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVtgb153S6I

Note: Advertising begins at 5:50. Feel free to stop watching!

Google itself acknowledges that it only indexes a part of the Internet.

The area that are not indexed by Google and other search engines are called the Dark Web or the Invisible Web.

• Pages below the top level of a site.
• Government websites
• Private Webs: sites that require registration and login (password-protected resources. E.g. Full text articles in a university library's databases
• Different file types. Any file that is not text or HTML will be more challenging to find on the Internet
• Dynamic content: dynamic pages which are returned in response to a submitted query or accessed only through a form,

Using library databases is one way of accessing the scholarly invisible web.

Deep Web [image]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.deepwebtech.com/

Google Custom Search allows you to build a search engine that will search a group of specific websites that you include.

The following sites can of great use to students

• OpenDoar: 

OpenDOAR provides a quality-assured listing of open access repositories around the world.

Lets you search the contents of the academic repositories listed in OpenDOAR for freely available academic research information.

• Carlton University Government Information Custom Search:

Lets you search more than 775 websites at the Federal, Provincial and Municipal levels of government.