Introduction to
Internet
Search Engines
Concepts
Covered:
What is the Internet?
Search Engines
Metasearch Engines
Subject Directories
Keyword Search Engine
Tips
Metasearch Engine Tips
Scholar.google.com
Printing/Emailing, Saving
& Bookmarking Websites
Web Resources are
in
MARLIN
Evaluating Internet Resources
How to Cite Internet Resources
Internet Researching tips from
Malaspina's
On-Line
Learner Community
WHAT IS THE INTERNET?
The Internet is a seamless network of fibre-optic
cables and telephone lines connecting hardware and software across the world
using communication protocol to exchange information. No one really knows how large the Internet is, and it is
expanding at a phenomenal rate each year. It
is utilized by academics, researchers, journalists, educators, politicians,
students, business people, and anyone else who has a computer connected to this network of networks through an Internet Service Provider (ISP).
The Internet makes electronic mail or
email possible. It allows us to
search online catalogues at other libraries and to visit websites of stored
information which can be plain text, graphics, sound, video files, interactive
programs, etc.
The Internet began in the United
States in the late 1960s when the U.S. defense department stored duplicate files
on duplicate computers in a network where these files could be accessed and
exchanged by others. The U.S.
National Science Foundation stepped in to assist with the technological
development which resulted in supercomputers linked at certain nodes across the
country. These computers and their
cabling became the backbone of the Internet.
No one owns the Internet. No one has control over it.
Internet Service Providers, acting as intermediaries, store information
on their computers (called servers) to extend a local service to customers using
telephone or TV cable lines.
The World Wide Web (WWW) refers to the
billions of files that have been developed with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
and deposited on servers all over the world.
These files can be retrieved by other servers, called clients, using
HTML. A file or a set of files is
given a specific storage address which allows other computers to find it.
These files, which can be text, graphics, sound or video files, are
organized on websites by their creators.
The World Wide Web refers to all of these.
Anyone can make a website using special markup language. A website
with its web pages becomes accessible when it is stored under a specific address
on a server with the appropriate functionality.
And, of course, you are at this moment reading a research tutorial web page
stored at the Malaspina University-College Library’s website.
HTML consists of standardized codes
used to prepare web pages for Internet accessibility.
These codes are embedded in the document so that you cannot see them
until they are requested. HTML
allows for the creation of hyperlinks which are underlined words, usually in a
different colour from the rest of the text.
Other hyperlinks reveal themselves as a hand when you move the mouse over
the web page. One way to “surf the net”
is to click on these hyperlinks using the left mouse button.
Another way to surf the Internet is to
find out a website’s address or Uniform Resource Locator (URL). This address always begins with http:// followed by the
remainder of the address. In
Internet Explorer, the web or Internet browser that we use on the Library’s
computers, the address is typed into the Address box at the top of the page. While most of Malaspina’s computers use Internet Explorer
as their browser, you may be using another browser such as Netscape Navigator
from your home computer.
The screen partially reproduced above is Malaspina
Library's homepage.
The grey bar across the top contains the Internet Explorer browser
buttons, often referred to as the Tool Bar.
The arrows Back and Forward  will help you navigate through web pages
easily. The Stop button 
will permit
you to stop the downloading of a website that turns out to be slow loading or
not what you were hoping for. The
Refresh button  will help you restore the web page if it has become corrupted, or
if the pictures did not load properly. The
Home button  will take you to the website designated as home for you; in
the case of the Library's computers, it will take you to the Malaspina University-College library homepage
shown above. Return to
top.
SEARCH ENGINES
While you can type in URL addresses to your favourite websites and
use the embedded hyperlinks on those websites to get to other websites, these
methods have limited use in accessing the Internet or searching for specific
information from websites you have not yet visited. To access the wider
web, you must use a search engine. A search engine permits you to search
for keywords on websites throughout the web.
A search engine does for websites what a journal index does for journal articles
and a catalogue does for books: a search engine provides a listing of websites
that contain the keywords you are trying to find.
There are dozens of excellent Internet search engines to choose from. A
good place to start looking for search engines is Weblinks from the Marlin
toolbar, General Weblinks, Search/Meta Search Engines subcategory.
One search engine that retrieves the more scholarly websites is Google.
Alta Vista and Hotbot
are also good search engines.
However, do try out others to see which one suits you best.
When you perform a
search using a search engine, you are searching as much of the web as that
particular
search engine has indexed, usually millions of websites. While this
gives you access to a great deal of information, you may be overwhelmed
with result sets of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of websites.
You can limit the search results by using advanced search techniques –
sometimes.
Whichever search engine
you choose, learn to use it well. Take
time to read the Help or Search Tip screens available with any search engine.
Return
to top.
METASEARCH ENGINES
Metasearch engines perform your search in a number of
search engines, usually less than a dozen or so, and return the top 10 (or so)
websites from each search engine that responded to your search. The
results for your search will be much lower in number than the same search performed using
a keyword search engine. The time limits may prevent some individual
engines from being included in any search you perform, so the results may vary
from search to search and from day to day, even though you may be typing the
search exactly the same way each time.
The following metasearch engines are recommended:
Metacrawler
http://www.metacrawler.ca
Search.Com
http://www.search.com/
search?cat=11&go=no
Dogpile
http://www.dogpile.com/
SUBJECT DIRECTORIES
These provide subject
access to the Internet. Your search
is performed on a database of websites that have been chosen by the subject
directory sponsor as being noteworthy, informative, scholarly, practical, etc.,
for their assumed audience. In
other words, the websites have been selected using criteria by librarians or
experts in the relevant field.
The value of the results in a subject directory will depend upon whether
or not you agree with the criteria used in the initial selection process.
Check out the Library’s WebLinks from the Marlin search
screen (from the Library’s Homepage, click on
Search for Resources, then
choose the WebLinks button, then Subject Weblinks). The
Malaspina librarians responsible for library purchases and research
instruction for the various departments have chosen these websites as being
particularly useful. Under the
science web resources, there is often a category called “Gateways” which operate
much like Internet subject directories for specific disciplines.
To
see the websites your instructors recommend, go the Malaspina’s Home
Page, click on Resources for Faculty and Staff, then click on Instructional
Departments. Lastly, choose the department of interest.
Some noteworthy commercially available subject directories follow:
BUBL WWW Information Server
http://bubl.ac.uk/
Canadian Information by Subject
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/caninfo/ecaninfo.htm
WWW Virtual Library
http://vlib.org/
YAHOO Search Engine
http://www.yahoo.com/
Librarian's Index to the Internet
http://lii.org/
SCHOLAR.GOOGLE.COM
"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for
scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints,
abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google
Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers,
professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as
scholarly articles available across the web." While this search
engine is currently in Beta mode, it is worth your while to check it out.
The URL is http://scholar.google.com.
Please note that, if you are using Scholar.google.com from a
computer off campus, you may not be able to get the full text of some of the
citations. In addition, the search engine may take you to a webpage where
you can buy the full text. Do not purchase the full text from this webpage.
You can either log into the Malaspina Library catalogue and search for the
needed article in the online journal cited in the Scholar.google.com search, or
redo your search when you are next on campus. For help in getting the full
text from your Scholar.google.com searches from off campus, call the reference
librarian at 740-6151 or email us at reference@mala.bc.ca.
SOME
BASIC SEARCH TIPS FOR
USING A KEYWORD SEARCH ENGINE
The Google search engine
is accessible from the Library’s online catalogue, or directly by typing the URL
http://www.google.ca in your browser's
address field. It provides access to over 4 billion websites,
with good academic-level
coverage.
Let's examine a search in Google by typing "pet therapy" in
quotation marks in the search command line. The quotation marks
tell the search engine that we want to search "pet therapy" as a phrase.
Acknowledgement:
We wish to thank Google®
for their permission to use screen captures of their search engine throughout
this tutorial.
The search engine
responded that it found 634,000 web pages containing the phrase, at the time of this
writing. Don't worry about having to browse through all those websites. The most
relevant sites will be on the first results screen or two. Several of the results have been extracted and partially reproduced
below for further study:
You can access websites from the search engine results lists by passing
the mouse's arrow over the search results. The arrow will change into a hand
at the blue underlined words. Once
the hand appears, you can click on the left-hand button on the mouse to access
the web page desired. Use the
browser's back arrow key from the top of the screen to return to the results list after you have finished
visiting a website.
Like
any good search engine, Google provides some Advanced Search techniques that
will help make your searches more precise, or to broaden or narrow your
searches. Click on the hyperlinked words Advanced Search Tips found on any
search results screen.
Regardless
of the search engine you use, always spend a few moments learning the
recommended search
techniques, and you will be much happier with your results. For example,
Google uses boolean operator symbols +, -, OR. There is even a symbol
(being the tilde ~) that will provide synonyms for any search words you have.
Return
to top.
SOME BASIC SEARCH TIPS
USING A METASEARCH ENGINE
Let's do the same search in Metacrawler,
a metasearch engine:
Acknowledgements:
We wish to thank Metacrawler ® for
their permission to use screen captures from their search engine throughout this
tutorial.
With a phrase search
for "pet therapy," Metacrawler returns 115 results (at the time of this
writing).
This is certainly a much smaller list of websites to peruse.
This
result list display varies slightly from that of Google.
After the URL address, there is a hyperlink to the search engine(s) which
provided that particular result to Metacrawler.
If more than one search engine returned a website, this is indicated. As
you browse through this Metacrawler result list, you may be encouraged by the
relevancy of the websites. Again, after you have finished using a web page, you must use
the browser back arrow button to return to the Metacrawler result list.
Return to top.
PRINTING,
EMAILING, SAVING AND
BOOKMARKING FROM THE INTERNET
Once you find some information that you wish to use, you can click on
File from your browser's Tool Bar to access the Print, Send or Save As functions.
We wish to thank Karen Arnoff for permission to use this
screen capture from The Dog Connection website.
To
Save a web page's information onto a diskette, make sure a diskette is in the A:
drive, pull down the menu from File, as illustrated above, and click on Save As.
The following Save Web Page box will display.
Make
sure that the "Save in:" box says 3 ½ Floppy (A:), and that the
"Save as type" says
text file, text only, or html as shown. You may
edit the File name if you choose. Then
click on the Save button.
The text from the web page will be saved to your diskette. You may use the information later by opening the saved
information into any word processing software.
To
print a web page, pull down the File menu as before, and click on Print.
A print set up box will appear, and you need only click on the OK
button. The printing will go to the
printer attached to your computer. Should
you be using a library computer at the time, the printing will be done at one of
the two print release stations in the Nanaimo Library for a charge of 10 cents per
black and white page, or $1 per colour page. Check with library staff at
the regional campuses for printing information and charges in effect there.
To
email the web page to yourself, pull down the File menu, click on Send, and further
click on Page by E-mail. You will
then have an opportunity to type in your full email address and execute the send
request.
And if you can always bookmark the web page so that you can get to it directly
later by pulling down the Favorites menu, and clicking on Add to Favorites.
After you have added a website to Favorites, you will be able to access that
website in the future without firstly having to search for it with a search
engine or typing out the URL in the address line. The title for the
webpage will appear in a list under the Favorites menu:
WEB RESOURCES
ARE INCLUDED
IN THE LIBRARY'S ONLINE CATALOGUE
You should be aware that the librarians responsible for library purchases select
and add web resources to the online catalogue on an on-going basis. These
web resources are often government publications that are no longer being
published in printed form. Access to these documents has been made by
hotlinking from Malaspina's catalogue record to the governmental or other computer
storing the document. Other scholarly websites are continually being added to
the online catalogue.
You can restrict your online
catalogue searches to access only these catalogued web resources by firstly
choosing the MARLIN'S Web
search type button from the right-hand frame of the online catalogue search
command screen. Return
to top.
EVALUATING
THE INTERNET
You must use
the same criteria when evaluating Internet websites as you do for books and
journal articles. Is the website
authoritative? Is an individual or
a reputable organization taking responsibility for the information presented?
Is it signed? What was the
date of the last updating? Is the website still being maintained?
Is there a bias stated or presumed?
The following suffixes may convey useful information:
.edu
The website is hosted at
an educational institution.
The
information may be scholarly. Watch for
~ suffixes,
however, which may indicate that a
student or other individual is
authoring the web page.
.gov
A
governmental body is hosting this website.
The
information may be authoritative and likely biased to
show the
present government in a favourable light.
.org
The
website is hosted by an organization or society.
The
value of the information it contains will depend
upon the
reputation of the organization hosting it and
how you feel
about that organization.
.com
A commercial organization is hosting this
website.
They
will want to sell you something. Watch for bias.
Consider
that the information may be merely advertising
of the
product or service for sale.
~
An individual is authoring this website.
Assume the
information
conveyed is biased. It may also be
inaccurate
or misleading.
Papers
researched solely on the Internet have been proven to be inferior to those researched
using scholarly books and journal articles. Considering
how much bias and unsubstantiated “information” there is on the web, this is
not surprising.
Before you use any
Internet resources in your Malaspina essays, be sure to check with your
instructor to determine whether web resources are permitted. Many
instructors permit no web resources in their assignments; others permit
only a certain percentage of such resources. Return
to top.
HOW TO CITE
INTERNET RESOURCES
A good online resource to use when preparing your bibliographical entries for
the Internet resources you cite is:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/cgos2006/basic.html
In addition, the various authoritative style guides (such as Modern Language Association or MLA, American Psychological Association or APA, Chicago
Style Manual, etc.) will help you prepare bibliographic entries for Internet or
other online resources. Generally
speaking, you will need to record the author of the web page, if given, the
title of the web page, the URL address, and the date you accessed the web page.
The following is a sample of a reference from the WWW using MLA style:
Nineteenth-Century German Stories. Ed.
Robert Godwin-Jones. 1994.
Foreign Lang. Dept., Virginia Commonwealth U.
10 Jan. 1997 <http://www.fln.vcu.edu/menu.html>
Here is the same reference using APA style:
Godwin-Jones, R. (Ed.). (1994). Nineteenth-century German stories.
Retrieved January 10, 1997 from the World Wide Web: <http://www.fln.vcu.edu/menu.html>.
For additional information on citing your research sources, see the Research
Tutorial How to Cite Your Sources.
INTERNET
RESEARCHING - MALASPINA'S ON-LINE LEARNER COMMUNITY
Do
spend a few minutes with the Internet Researching web page from Malaspina's
On-Line Learner Community. It can be accessed at http://web.mala.bc.ca/online/Mala_Resources/Study_Resources/internet_researching.htm.
It provides useful tips for writing for the Internet and doing research on the
Internet. In addition, it has some excellent weblinks.
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