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Journal Entry Day 1: Lesson 1: Search EnginesI found it very interesting that the search engines were given the analogy of spiders crawling through web space from link to link to identify pages for use in searchable databases. I didn’t realize that when I was searching using a search engine that the material I found was not necessarily the entire web at that moment but a fixed index created at an earlier date. I look at the “news” on my AOL homepage and was glad to know that these news indexes are partnered with specialized “news” databases that are kept current. I was staggered to read about the 17 million new web sites that have been added to the Internet since 2005. I had no idea the Information Highway was that massive. I found the discussion of GOOGLE and the indexing of the 170 terabytes in 7 years time very interesting. I can’t believe it would take 300 years to index everything on the Internet so far, even if no one added anything new. I have always used some of the more known search engines for shopping and entertainment on the Web. I have experienced the down side of pulling up far more irrelevant search results than I needed. I realize that all search engines are not the same and that there is a certain “ranking” that goes on for the web page results found in a search. Most of the best pages are shown at the top of the list of results. Google even has an “I Feel Lucky” button that puts the most popular used site first and takes you directly to it. You can get a wide range of results by using a search engine for materials on the Web. I tried the ASSIGNMENT and found that the Connecticut Compromise brought up many more results than when I put it in quotation marks to narrow my search. On the Ask search engine, which I had never heard of or used before, the search pulled up a “Sponsored Result” of an “IRS offer in Compromise” (reducing tax article) which had nothing to do with the Connecticut Compromise. Journal Entry Day 2: Lesson 2: Metasearch EnginesI had no idea that there was a difference in a search engine and a metasearch engine until I read this lesson. Instead of “crawling through the Web” compiling their own databases, they search all of the files of the other search engines at the same time to find the best results for a search. I was not aware of the metasearch results being in a single and multiple listing. I had never used anything but Google so I was fascinated by seeing Dogpile, Mamma, and Vivisimo. My 9/11 Commission Report search on Mamma turned up 34 search results where my query on Vivisimo turned up only 8 results. These articles were clustered together and the Vivisimo seemed to be a government search portal with access to many more documents than just those of 9/11. I went to Dogpile just for fun because I hadn’t ever been there except during class that Saturday we found the Viking Kittens with the rock song on it. I have actually been searching for oil lamps for future hurricane preparations and I went to all of these different search sources and found many places I could purchase them. These lessons are quite practical. The meatsearchers were also very fast in returning the results I queried. multiple listing single listing Journal Entry Day 3: Lesson 3: Subject Directories I found out today that the subject directories on the Internet are different from the search engines in that human editors maintain them. They don’t have the “robots” or “spiders” crawling about to keep them organized and current. I learned that they usually list a great deal smaller amount of results. I learned that there are many types of directories; from general, academic and commercial to “portals” like the one I found on Vivisimo, and “vortals”, which are even more specific. Then there are the subject directories that have partnered and developed their own search engines. Two very powerful ones are MSN and YAHOO Subject Directory and Search Engines. I have always just looked at these as “homepages” with access to other information. I didn’t realize the technical name for them as Subject Directories. I guess my AOL Homepage, where I get my news, etc., can be classified as a subject directory. I did notice that when you search the subject directories you go through a lot of different layers or steps to get to what you might actually need. When I completed the ASSIGNMENT using the Beaucoup, under “Health and Fitness” I found “Food and Diet” but never “Weight Loss”,specifically. It was very frustrating. When I used Open Directory Project, I found a very detailed listing with specific references to Weight Loss 352 with everything from BMI Indexing to specific diet plans. I would much prefer using this. Journal Entry Day 4: Lesson 4: Gateways and Subject Specific DatabasesToday I learned that there are two kinds of gateways: library gateways and portals. I learned that these are both collections of very reliable and researched informational sites that tend to point us to a more academic search result. I had never heard of a “vortal”, a vertical portal, until now. I think it is great that this provides a way for professors, or other experts in their particular fields of knowledge, to communicate their knowledge to the public in a safe and speedy environment. I had never heard of the “Invisible Web” or the “Deep Web”. This is the part of the Web that even the “spiders” and “robots” can’t get to to index. It contains things such as archived information and protected sites not meant for the general public, necessarily. It seems that if 60%-80% of the material out on the Web is made up of this “hidden material” , then we have an amazing amount of other materials that can be accessed if we know just how to zero in and “ point our browser” to it. I am realizing daily, as I go through this tutorial, how very little I know about the Internet and the information offered out in cyberspace. I gathered that if you want truly high quality information that has been reviewed and determined reliable ,use the library gateways . Using the subject-specific databases when you want information on special topics and “main-stream” searching. I enjoyed trying to “track down” Ms. Chamberlain’s “Netiquette” lesson. On my first try ,using Google and the single term “netiquette”, my search returned 7,830,000 results. When I went back and “pointed” to the page in question by adding her specific keywords to my query, I got 162 results and hers was the #1 site listed. The tutorial was very enlightning for me. I didn’t realize that it is considered rude to type in all caps and that this was considered as “shouting” on the Internet. All of the other 9 rules made common sense except #6. I am still not sure I understand what she meant by cutting and pasting a reply, and I certainly was not aware that a reply could arrive before an original posting. You might explain this to me, if you have some extra time.Day 5 Journal Entry: Lesson 5: Evaluating Web PagesToday I learned how to tell if a web site was legitimate or a hoax. I had never really realized the significance of the complete URL (Web Address). The only listing I have ever paid any attention to was the “www” and upon reading the tutorial I found out it is the most nonessential part of the address! I guess that goes to show just how much I have to learn about the computer. I found the listing of the top-level domains recognized today very helpful. I list them here more for myself than anyone else because if I “write it” I tend to remember it better and these seemed important in deciding if a web address was a legitimate source. I was familiar with the .edu for educational site and even the .com for commercial business sites. The .net I was acquainted with through my school district networking system. The .gov for government sites and .mil for military sites and agencies should not be hard to remember. The .org for non-profit organizations and others seemed a broad category. The 7 new recognized suffixes were common sense when you looked at them: .aero- restricted use by air transportation industry; .biz- a general use for businesses; .coop-restricted use by cooperatives; .info-general use by both commercial and non-commercial sites; .museum-restricted use by museums; .name-general use by individuals; and .pro-restricted use by certified professionals and professional entities. I also scanned the ISOs list of Country Codes.The main thing I learned from this tutorial was to try to find out the authenticity of the author /publisher of the web site. Part of this you can do by using the above information on the URL source. However, there is other information that you can look at to tell about relevancy and authenticity. Usually, anyone taking the time to make a legitimate web page will update it regularly, have an address link to which one can forward any questions, and even have the name, address, telephone number, and email address of the owner. This can go a long way in web page evaluation. Once these basics are covered, viewing the content of the page itself is vital. I went to the two White House web sites. The following descriptions are what I found. The White House proved to be a very legitimate site. All photos, articles, and information was accurate and in good taste. The language used was appropriate and the site basically informative about The White House in Washington, D.C. However; the web site The White House proved to be a hoax and slur against the President now in office and the government in general. The headlines and bylines were worded in a silly, vulgar, and inappropriate manner. All of the information was biased even down to the captions beneath the photos. I did take the time to assess the three other sites in the ASSIGNMENT for their validity as good web sites. Causes of the Civil War appeared to be a legitimate site citing the view of the Civil War from the perspective of those in North Georgia. There was a great deal of factual material but some of it held the North Georgian bias. Still, I evaluated the site to be legitimate. The other two sites I found to be hoaxes. General Delivery University was a bogus site readily recognizable from the title page – “America’s Only Genuine Diploma Mill”. The course offerings were bogus as well. In the College of Urban Agriculture section, AG 103: Home Gardening for Fun and Profit described its course content as “cultivating marijuana as America’s #1 crop”. On the site Feline Reactions to Bearded Men the title ”Improbable Research” and the sarcastic language was the giveaway of the non-validity of the site. Journal Entry Day 6: Lesson 6: Creating a Search StrategyToday I learned that it is best to know exactly what type of searching you want to do before you set out to “surf the Net”. I use the computer mostly for browsing or shopping and research for school information. But the reason I am searching on the computer to begin with will determine which strategy or method of searching I will use. If I just want information on a subject area I can use a subject directory like Yahoo or I can enter some keywords into a metasearch engine like Vivisimo. I can also get specific information on a major search engine such as Google or even specialized information on specialized databases. The default settings discussion was a little difficult for me to understand, but I did figure out that each search engine has a specific “setting” or way of connecting me to information using the conjunctions AND or OR. Sometimes many irrelevant search results will list because I might not know my default settings on my search engine and skew the results by the way I enter it. This section reminded me a great deal of the class I had with Dr. Hoffmann on Boolean Searching – very confusing. I also found out that there are words that search engines DON’T stop for when they are searching texts for the keywords entered in titles or documents. These are called STOP WORDS. These words are small common words in everyday speech. I found the basic instructional tips for creating a search to be very helpful. They are as follows: Be specific. Whenever possible, use nouns and objects as key words. Put most important terms first in your keyword list; to ensure that they will be searched, put a + sign in front of each one. Use at least 3 words in my query. Combine words, whenever possible, into phrases. Avoid using common words unless they are part of a phrase. Think about words you might expect to find in the document and use some of those as your key words. The final one seems most important to me – Write down your search statement and revise it before you type it into a search engine. I completed the ASSIGNMENT by choosing the following search strategies: 1. “cover letter” “job search” : This strategy gave me 1,450,000 results with the #1 result being a Free Professional Sample Cover Letter for Job Seekers. 3. “cover letter” + template+ form: This strategy gave me 66,500 results with the #1 search result being a link to Job Bank USA and an article on the “trap” of using template resume letters followed. 5. “cover letter” + sample “helpful tips”: This strategy gave me no matching documents but gave a sponsored link at careers.. Journal Entry Day 7: Lesson 7: Basic Search TipsToday’s lesson was a continuation of yesterday with more emphasis on searching techniques. I did learn to use the + to force inclusion of words in my query and to use the – to exclude words in my query. I also learned that I can retrieve words side by side in the same order in a search if I will place double quotation marks(“”) around phrases. I didn’t realize that if I typed in just capitals that I would receive only capitals in return; whereas, if I typed in lower case letters for my query I would get both capital and lower case results. I learned about “truncation” or shortening of words and how to look for variations of spelling in queries. This lesson today gave me a brief taste of Boolean Searches. I learned to always enclose OR statements in parentheses.I chose “immune system” AND homeopathic (medicine OR remedy) for my ASSIGNMENT search. My search gave 202,000 results in 0.23 seconds,(Wow!) The results were a mixture of “sponsored links” for products and some homeopathic medicine and informative treatment articles. “AND” “OR” “NOT”/ “AND NOT” + - NEAR ADJSAMEFBYJournal Entry Day 8: Lesson 8: Searching with Boolean Proximity OperatorsToday was a deeper journey into the Boolean Logic Search technique. I found out the man’s name who created all of this preciseness – George Boole. He thought it was a “calculus of thought”. It’s no wonder it can be so confusing. Numbers have never been my forte! Anyway, again we review the fact that adding AND, OR, and NOT are the operators that link words and phrases for more precise queries. I will review what I learned here as succinctly as possible. The more times I enter the operator “AND” the more confined/narrow my search will become. This is because the documents retrieved will have to contain ALL of the keywords linked by the operator “AND”. By using the operator “OR” I will retrieve more documents/results in my search queries because the word “OR” signals the search engine to search words similar or synonymous with your keywords connected by “OR”. The “NOT”/ “AND NOT” will limit my search results because it will return documents/results with the first keyword used but not the second word used. I learned that the term “Nesting” (using parentheses), will enable me to put more than one search statement together or using more than one operator and three or more keywords. This nesting can be quite confusing. I learned that most Boolean Logic search operators are allowed in the “advanced search” mode within a search engine. I also learned that I can use an “Implied” version of Boolean and use + or – in front of keywords to force inclusion or force exclusion in my search efforts.Besides the basic Boolean operators I learned there are “Proximity Operators”. These words serve the same purpose as the previous operators only in relation to proximity or position of keywords. The only catch with these proximity operators is that not all search engines recognize them as they do Boolean. The proximity operators of which I had no idea of their existence are: NEAR, which allows searching for terms in any order but near the keywords; ADJ, which means adjacent to and signals that the two keywords must appear side by side on the document page but can appear in any order; SAME, which means that the keywords are found in the same field; and FBY, which means followed by. I chose the example: phylogeny NEAR ontogeny for my ASSIGNMENT. My query results were 324,000 in 0.33 seconds. The first two results were Wikipedia articles on what these terms meant. There were some Harvard educational references brought up as results as well. My query for “green tea” was quite large in its results giving 19,000,000. There were numerous sponsored links for products as I had expected, but the first result was again a Wikipedia article on Green Tea. It is very into Journal Entry Day 9 : Lesson 9: Field SearchingToday I learned that electronic records ( web page documents) are like print records in that they are organized into separate fields. I discovered the main fields of a typical web page consist of a title, domain, host (or site), URL, and link. I can search any of these options. Some search engines will allow me to search with extreme specificity if I have the correct information to lead me directly into a document for the information I need. Just as “finding the main idea” in reading can be done easily by sometimes looking at the title, title searching can be a good place to start because most of the important words in documents will appear in the title. Domains were discussed again and the major domains I listed earlier were listed as current top domains for searching. I can limit my search by using these domain searches. I can even search internationally by using the geographic two-letter code for a particular country to limit or expand my searching options. Host or site searching will give me information if I know that my material is on a specific computer server. If I know the name of a particular file that with the file name as part of the URL, I can find information quicker by using a URL search. If I want to know who or what documents link to a particular page I can do a link search. I was not aware that you could find images by image searching on the web except for through the “insert” tab in the tool bar, so this image searching was new to me. For my ASSIGNMENT I tried the IMAGE: bones.gif on Google Advanced Search. I retrieved 9 results in 0.10 seconds with the first result being the actual example used in this tutorial. There was another result on Internet search strategies and another on skeletons in connection with Tibiawiki, which seemed to be some kind of virtual computer game. The Bare Bones Tutorial in Spanish was retrieved as well. Journal Entry Day 10: Lesson 10: Troubleshooting- What to Do If…Today’s lesson was all too familiar for me. It reminded me of the many times I have wanted to punt-kick my computer! There is the greatest Garfield poster somewhere that I have seen. It shows Garfield drop-kicking his computer and the caption reads, “Have You Punt-Kicked Your Computer Today?” That is definitely me! Anyway, I was glad to learn what some of the “error messages” mean so that when I encounter them in the future maybe my frustration level will not be so high.I am listing them for my own benefit so that I can remember them better in the future. I may even print this cutesy “Error Computer” page out to tape by my desk. I’m just kidding! The “zillion” documents: I pretty well realize by now that there are not enough of my search terms or keywords. The more keywords I use the more defined or narrow my search will become so I need to be more specific. “Too few documents” returned means I limited my search too well. I either need to search on another engine, metasearcher, directory, or specialty resource or leave out some of my search terms to broaden the results. The “404—File Not Found” message is what aggravates me. Until I studied this tutorial I didn’t realize just how many web pages can be moved, deleted, or renamed, making it very difficult to keep up with them. I have encountered the “Server Does Not Have a DNS Entry” message many times with great frustration. I have tried everything from shutting down my computer to removing and reconnecting wires wondering why a well-known server or host cannot be found and why I can’t make a connection to it. I feel the same way about the “Server Error” or “Server is Busy” message. You would think that these main sites would know the “traffic” potential and prepare for this. It is very frustrating. I got these types of messages from our school server until they upgrades this fall. I really don’t mean to sound so negative, but for those of us who have limited knowledge or use of the computer these messages can be quite frustrating. I did go to the Surf the Web: Decoding Error Messages for my ASSIGNMENT and found similar messages with simplified solutions to the errors. I printed these out to place by my computer as well. Journal Entry Day 11: A Closer Look at Google, Yahoo, and ClustyToday I took a closer look at three search engines, metasearchers, and subject directories. My first visit was to Google, my favorite search engine of choice. I found out that Google was created by some graduate students from Stanford University in 1998. I remembered the earlier article about the “size of the Internet” and was not surprised to learn that Google is the largest of all search engines. It basically returns results based on the popularity of the sites listed and returns very relevant results. Older materials that have been cached or saved can be found using Google. It searches in its own web database with the Google Directory being powered by Open Directory Project.I was glad to see that the pages listed on the search engine discussions listed the “Defaults To” because I had wondered how one would know the operators on each search engine. Google defaults to the operator “AND”. The main search page supports many of the Boolean operators but searches for much material automatically. It is one of the most user-friendly of the search engines. I know this because I can use it with basically few problems and get satisfactory results! The Advanced Search page supports Boolean searching by using phrases such as: “ all the words” “at least one of the words”, and “without words”. One can custom display the results from 10-100 per page. I was not aware of the other links provided to “Topic-Specific pages, like, Google Book Search, Google Scholar, Froogle, among others. My favorite feature of Google is the “I Feel Lucky” button which automatically puts you on the top site of your query that is most visited.My ASSIGNMENT was interesting. I searched Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” on the following queries and got these results:click and clack: web site on car talkcolbert :Comedy Central’s Colbert Nation – Political Farcematrix: The Internet Movie Database page for Matrix movie with overview and trailer YAHOO! Yahoo Search! : A Closer Look I found it interesting that yet another search engine, Yahoo! Search, was created by Stanford graduate students. This one began in 1994. It started a little differently than its Google counterpart in that it began as a subject directory. It changed in 2002 to subject directory/search engine. The Yahoo Directory page is very busy but the search engine page is clean like Google. It searches in its own subject directory and on the Web. It defaults to “OR” in the Boolean operating system. The main directory page gives many choices of links for searching as well as box for searching on top of the page. The main search page uses + and – and supports double quotes for searching. You can search by links to image, video, audio, local, news, etc., just to name a few. The Advanced Search page uses the same Boolean support as Google in that “all of these words” and “none of these words”, etc., can be used in queries. I don’t use Yahoo! Search much at all. I much prefer Google. However, I have gone to the Yahoo! News and the Yahoo! Directory for downloading my computer games under their Game subject directory many times! Clusty: A Closer LookClusty is different than Google and Yahoo! in that it is a metasearcher that returns results from multiple sources with one query. A metasearcher named “Clusty” reminds me of clusters of different types of grapes (multiple sources) brought together to form a single fine wine ( query= result). That’s why I use the grapes and the wine for a visual. It helps me to visualize what the metasearcher is in comparison to the single search engine or subject directory. Anyway, Clusty was not a product of graduate students from Stanford, but a product of computer science researchers from Carnegie mellon University. It was created as an outgrowth of Vivisimo in 2000. It had become more popular than its “mother source” by 2004. Vivisimo and Clusty both use the concept of “clustering” search results by topic so that one can focus on specific categories needed for queried information. This keeps someone from having to sort through so many results. I found that you can not only complete basic Web searching on Clusty but can search for News, Images, Shopping, Wikipedia articles, Blogs, and Jobs. You can even click specific boxes on the Advanced Search page that will take you to certain business sites. It searches in multiple engines and directories such as Ask, GigaBlast, LookSmart, MSN, Open Directory, and Wisenut. The main page offers basic engine features and offers options for “full window”, “frame”, or “new window” for information retrieved. The advanced Page allows views of 100, 200, or 500 results at a time. It has options for serching by language and file types as well as a off/on feature for filtering offensive content that could result from a query. It will provide information in both lists and clusters by subject.My ASSIGNMENT took me to the main page of Clusty were I found 193 “clustered results” for WMD. The clusters ranged from sources on weapons of mass destruction(53) to Iraq(29), and Intelligence(11). Clicking on the “Sources Button” were 227 sources with a breakdown of all. The “Sites” tab rendered 205 sites from where clustered resources had been retrieved. The listed results was “Top 225 results of 2, 439,611. This is a very extensive and useful tool for researching and general use. All in all, I think the search engines, subject directories, and metasearchers, like Clusty, make a “fine vintage” of searching capabilities. Journal Entry Day 12: Lesson 18: Search Engine GraveyardToday’s lesson was sad but not surprising. It stands to reason with as many websites and various sources of information available on the World Wide Web that there would be a very competitive “market” for search engines, subject directories, and metasearchers for providing search results. There were very few search engines that I was familiar with as I read through the Search Engine Graveyard. However, believe it or not, there were a couple that I had heard of years ago when I first began using a computer in the most limited of ways. The one I remember most is Alta Vista. This was the engine that was developed to store every word of every document in a searchable index. It changed, like many others, to a combination search engine/subject directory and was taken over by Yahoo! like AlltheWeb in 2004. I vaguely remember Ask Jeeves, but the one I remember was a children’s version designed to allow students to ask basic questions in informal language. Both Ask Jeeves and Teoma , of which I had never heard, disappeared in 2006. These search engines now automatically redirect to search engine. The entire list of “dead engines” consisted of about 19 searchable databases. Now gone, some of the databases have kept their names and some may even be available on the Web, but they have been replaced by others such as Yahoo! or . Journal Entry Day 13: Lesson 20: Beyond Bare BonesToday is my final trip into the Bare Bones Tutorial pages. I found the recommended information and tutorial sites helpful. I did not go through each tutorial but I plan on doing it in the future. I have learned a great deal more about the Web and how to search its contents than I ever dreamed possible. This activity was cool and a great deal of fun trying to “visualize” what I thought I had learned from each session. I am going to sign up for the free newsletter of web search news, the Search Day Newsletter, and possibly the Tourbus online newsletter .I know that this tutorial is very basic and should be easy for anyone doing it. I found it very interesting but not easy. It was a lot of material to remember and digest but I think I will try the test anyway. I hope I won’t fail the assignment if I don’t do well on the test. I am really not a “test taker”. I have a tendency toward “test anxiety” and I can’t imagine taking a test about the computer, but I am going to try. ................
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