Chapter 3

When searching for information on the internet it is important to know how to search effectively to find what you’re looking for. One of the first steps is developing your search query. This query should have a specific keyword to narrow your search results. These keywords are used to find relevant web pages in the search results list. The results contain web pages that are most relevant to the keywords you searched. I know that Google has a really complex page ranking system which measures each page’s importance to give good search results. The engine asks questions about the keywords such as, If the keyword is in the title, url, or description. To evaluate the credibility of your search results you could look at the source, the quality of the page’s content, and the site’s overall design and functionality. The authority is the person who owns or sponsors the site. Search engines such as Bing and Google use a spider, or web crawler that searches the web. A web crawler is a program or script that browses the web in an efficient manner. Different engines have different indexes for the web crawler to search through. If you can’t find what you’re looking for using a regular search engine you should try using a metasearch engine, which is an engine that produces search results that have been compiled using multiple search engines. When creating your search query there are many techniques you can use to get better results. Search engines usually ignore question words since they are usually implied. If you group two keywords together with quotation marks such as “college subtends”, you should get good results. If you add unnecessary words that are already related to your search query you could possibly eliminate some good sources.