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When I wanted to find something on the Internet, but I didn't know the address I could type in the subject topic and click on "Search." You can search the Web or a Usenet. The Web is the World Wide Web where most of the pages are located. A usenet is like a bulletin board where anyone who has anything to share with online users can post their information. When you click on search you can choose to use one or both of these. They may yield different types of information. This would then take me to a Web search engine such as Webcrawler. Once the topic is found the address of the page appears and it takes you to that page. Once you have the address you can write it down for future use so that you can go directly to that page. The search engines are good for finding out information about various topics that you don't know the address for. That is what the search engine is for, to search for the information and Web page for you.
Using a search engine when you know very little about computers is not that hard. It is basically self explanatory and the programs are user friendly to make it easier. It is often a procedure of trial and error.
I didn't know what I wanted to research so I was thinking of a subject to look for in the search engine. One day I was reading a magazine and there was a page in there that gave information on celebrity homepages. Ever since Speed came out I have been a fan of Keanu Reeves so I decided to look up his page. In the magazine it tells you to use a search engine and type in the name of the celebrity, so that's what I did.
I used America Online and clicked on the World Wide Web. Then I typed in Keanu Reeves in the address box where it says Go to, then clicked on Search. It then took me to the Webcrawler page and I typed in Keanu Reeves again and it started to search. Not long after that I had the address and was automatically at his page! This was easy to do, I thought that it would be harder and more complicated, but I was happily surprised to find that it wasn't.
Not much advice. These search engines are easy to use so all you have to do is type in the topic and click Search. This is time consuming because it takes a while for the search engine to search your topic so make sure you have plenty of time when you do this. Try some experimenting and eventually you will get it. If you need help you can click on Help or Tips in the search engine. All of the ones I used had a help section. This will tell you how to interpret the search results or how to arrange your words of your topic better.
Students from the prior generations who have used the search engines have basically the same thoughts as I do. Curtis Nakao thought that it was pretty simple to use and he had no real problems using the search engine. Cherish Higashi said that the Webcrawler was very user friendly, which is my thought exactly. Also, Sondra Blake thought that there were time constraints when using the search engines, but she felt that her results were useful. So every generation has basically the same thoughts and since it has continued through the generations it will probably continue on. So those of you who will start using search engines, be prepared!
To find out how search engines work I went to a page that Dr. James suggested, Searching The Internet. From here I went to another page that was listed under "About Searching." This took me to Webreference.com , a page that explains about search engines. The search engines finds its information by listings from authors that want their page on the Internet or by getting it from searching programs such as "spiders" or "robots." These programs search the Internet and stores the links and information about the pages it goes to. They start with a list or popular sites and go to those pages. From here they go to the links on these pages and stores them in memory. It then sends the title and URL (Universal Resource Locator) back to the engine.
When you do your search you can type in the keywords to start the search. Once the search engine has searched its databases it gives the matches a relevance score. This score indicates how strong the match is to your keyword. There is also a little summary of the page which is usually some text from the beginning of the document. To do a more advanced search you can do a Boolean search. This is more specific because you can use the words AND, OR, or NOT. This will allow the user to make the search more concise. By using NOT you can eliminate unwanted matches.
The three search engines that I decided to try was Infoseek, Yahoo!, and Lycos. To find out how these search engines worked I had to go to the Help button on the homepage of the engine. To get to this page I first had to click on Net Search in Netscape and from there I clicked on one of the search engines I wanted to use. It then loaded the homepage of the engine and then I clicked on Search or Go Get It and it took me to another page of the search engine. From there I could click on Help in Infoseek and Lycos and Yahoo Info in Yahoo! In the help section it basically tells you how to do your search and what will happen during the search. The three search engines work basically the same way. They were all easy to use and pretty much self explanatory. It did, however, take a long time for the pages to show up. I think that it could be the time of day that I did the search. This was done in the evening on a weekday and it seemed like I was just sitting and waiting most of the time.
In the Infoseek search engine you can either search or browse. If you search the WWW it produces the broadest results. You can type in a few words that describe what you are looking for and click "Search" and Infoseek will search its databases and find related topics for you. You can look for usenet groups, which are forums for discussion that people put up their articles for others to read. You can search for a certain company, the e-mail address of people, news stories that have happened in the past month, and frequently asked questions (FAQ's). There is also a section on the homepage that is called Infoseek Select Sites which are categorized under popular topics, this allows you to browse the Web, all you do is click on a topic and it takes you there.
In Yahoo! if you know what you are looking for you can use Yahoo! search by typing in the keyword and it will search until it finds listing that match your keyword. This also allows you to surf by clicking on one of the topics on the homepage. This search engine is updated daily so you know that its search will be productive. The Headlines is updated hourly!
In Lycos you can also do subject and word searches. From the Searching The Internet document this search engine allows the user to use a Boolean search. You can also visit cities and if you don't know the exact spelling of the word it allows you to type in a fragment and it will search it for you. This one is different from the others in that you can search for pictures and sounds. There is a section on the menu bar that will allow you to search for pictures, photos, art designs, music, and noises.
The three search engines that I used were Infoseek, Yahoo!, and Lycos. I found that these search engines produced basically the same kind of results and were set up the same way. I decided to look for the generational curriculum on the search engines. I first started with Yahoo! To get here I had to get into Netscape then click on Net Search, just below the location box. Net Search lets you choose which search engine you want to use. I clicked on Yahoo! and it took me to that search engine. Once in Yahoo! I typed in generational curriculum and then clicked on Search, right next to the topic box. Then the search engine did its job, which did not take very long. Although sometimes you can be waiting for a long time, maybe even five minutes.The next thing that came up was the matches that were found. It said that there were "No Yahoo Categories - No Yahoo Sites - Alta Vista Web Pages" Alta Vista and Yahoo! are joined together and Alta Vista was the one that found the matches, not Yahoo! I guess because our Web pages are registered there. There were 2969 matches containing generational curiculum and the first twenty matches were displayed. All the matches that were found was from our generations and Dr. James' homepage. It was pretty exciting to see some of my classmates' names and think that the search engine had found it. At the end of the twenty matches you could click on Next 20 Matches and it will display the rest. I even found my address! In the summary generational curriculum was in bold faced type.
In Infoseek I did the same thing, type in generational curriculum and click Seek. There were 1 - 10 sites of 231,550 and the first ten were displayed. On the side of the topic box were related topics that you could click on. You could also click on Next 10 to look at the next group of matches. Our generations were found, Dr. James' homepage, as well as related topics to education that contained the word curriculum. I tried to look for my address by typing in Jill Umetsu at the bottom of the page, but no matches were found. There are some tips below the topic box to better the results of the search.
In Lycos again I did the same thing, type in generational curriculum and click on Go Get It. This one found 8369 relevant documents from a total of 60,434,860 indexed Web pages: generational curriculum. The words that matched which was either generational or curriculum were bold faced in the summary. The student generations were not found, mostly matches containing curriculum were displayed. At the bottom of this page you could jump around by going to the 10th page from the first page.
Of the three search engines that I used Yahoo! was the one that found the most relevant matches. However, that could be because it is together with Alta Vista and we registered our homepages with Alta Vista at Dr. James' request. (This was easy to do, all you have to do is go to Alta Vista's homepage, click Add URL, and type in your address. Make sure that it is correct! Then click on Submit next to the address box, it takes a few seconds and your page will be found. The next screen tells you that your page was found by their robots and it will be registered within 36 hours.) The search engines were basically the same. It displayed the matches with a little summary to go along with it. The words that you typed in as your topic were bold faced. You can keep on going until you look at all of your matches, which could take a while because there is so much. To go to one of the matches all you do is click on the title and that homepage shows up on your screen.
I have learned that search engines are like the catalog in a library. You type in your topic and the engine will search it for you. Once it finds matches for your topic you have the option of clicking on one of them and the search engine will take you there. Just like finding a call number in the catalog you can then look for the book. The call number of the book is the address of the page and the page is the book with all of its information.
I now think of the Web as a huge library. It contains millions of "books" which are actually the pages. However, the Web may be better than a library because there are so much pages from different parts of the country all in one place. There is also so much more such as entertainment guides and headlines. When on the Web you don't have to move to go look for the book, all you do is sit at the computer and click on what you are looking for.
My online personality is like my real personality. I like to search for the things that I am interested in and I like having the results right there. What I don't like is the waiting. Even one minute is a long time to wait. I get so frustrated and impatient waiting for the search engines to go to the page and waiting for it to load up. It seems like I spent most of the time waiting, which is very frustrating especially when you could be doing other things. Sometimes I'm tempted to stop the search. If I'm at home I'll walk around and do other things while I'm waiting. This way I usually wait a long time because I'm not just sitting and looking at the screen. If I do stop it and re-do the search it still takes a long time so I have learned to just wait, or stop it only once. Online my personality can also be different because I can explore things that I wouldn't otherwise be interested in. I can click on this and click on that and explore different pages and topics. That's the beauty of having an online personality, permission to be free because no one really knows you.
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