Module 3: Finding and Evaluating Information on the World Wide Web

Task 4: Understanding Search Engines

Name: _______________________ Instructor: __________________ Section: ________

Objectives

In this task you will learn to:

• use a search engine to find material on the web
• understand the differences among search engines
• explain how search engines work

Instructions

Activity 1: Learning about Search Engine Differences

Before you begin this activity, create a new folder called My Searches in your collection of links. In this activity, you will conduct the same search in three different search engines and you will save a link to each of these searches in your My Searches folder.

1. Go to www.google.com and enter the following exactly as it appears here (including the quotation marks) into the search box :
   "how search engines work"
2. Make sure that the results page contains the first 10 hits only.
3. Add a link to this page to your collection of links.
4. Print this first page of results.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 above with each of these search engines:
   search.yahoo.com
   www.teoma.com
6. Once you have printed out the three pages of hits, fill in the information in the table below:

Activity 2: Learning about Search Engines

Use any of the resources you found in Activity 1 to answer the questions below:

A. Most web search engines consist of three main components: a finder/fetcher, an indexer/ranker, a query server. What does each of these components do?

B. What is a spider or web crawler?

C. What happens to the information found by a spider or web crawler?

D. What is a Boolean search?

E. How do search engines handle natural language queries?

F. What areas of the web do search engines not look at?

G. What determines the order in which a search engine lists the hits it finds?

H. Why does the same search conducted on three different search engines result in three different hit lists?