Week 5 Blog

Lecture Summary:

Categories of information on the web:

• The Free Visible Web – all publicly mounted pages that are accessible by search engines


• The Free Invisible Web – all publicly accessible information that is not available through search engines and must be sourced through a particular web site


• Paid Databases over the web – commercial databases that contain scholarly journals, newspapers, and reputable information

Search tool types – Search Engines and Directories

Search Engine – a web based application that crawls the web searching for information, and indexing them according to keywords (Google, yahoo, AltaVista, alltheweb).


Search engines often contain problems relating to, to many results, limited relevance and quality, inclusion of broken links (sites that are no longer run), misuse of the page ranking and scoring system, the ability to determine how far to actually look through the information displayed.

Directories – are a human edited, web pages are submitted directly and then reviewed to ensure integrity. (Google Directory, Yahoo Directory)

Common search engines, Google, ask jeeves, yahoo, and msn search

Types of queries for search engines – Keyword, Phrase, Boolean, Advanced/engine features

How to select the right keywords and Search Tips


Workshop Write Up:


Visit Monash University’s interactive tutorial on search engines and directories, http://www/.monash.com/spidap.html the site offers tips on how to use search engines and directories




Know where to look first - There are various databases containing specific information that might be more useful to you than a general search engine.

Fine tune your keywords - Limit your search words be specific narrow your search terms before you search

Refine your keywords – Learn to exclude terms using Boolean search tools, and learn what type of keywords to use, and to exclude

Query by example – a method where the user tells the search engine to query more results like the ones displayed.

Visit the Siteseen quiz site http://www.siteseen.co.uk/questions/historytrivia/ , an complete the quiz using the search tips above to find the correct answers to answer the questions.




I used Google to search for my answers, and applied the search tips covered in the Monash article, I ensured I refined my keywords, and made them specific and relevant to the questions required to be answered.

Summary of Readings:

Internet Search Tips and Strategies
Categories of information on the web – The free visible web, the free invisible web, paid databases over the web

Search tool types – search engines consists of an interface you use to type in a query, websites matching that query are displayed in a results window, directories are categorised lists of sites picked out by human editors, directories contain small amounts of high quality articles.

Types of searches:

• Keyword search – will find all pages containing the keyword entered into the search bar, keyword searches display results in the order of relevance to keyword
• Phrase search – perform a search using an exact phrase, so only pages with that phrase are displayed.
• Boolean operators – Basic AND, OR, NOT logic operators which when combined with search keywords determine how the search engine uses the keywords and will vary the results displayed.

Search Engines

The late 1980’s saw so much data on the internet that it was too difficult to rely on tips from other users. In 1992 there were 1,000,000 hosts. This saw the creation of search engines, servers that would catalogue available web pages an allow them to be easily accessed or found search engines included (Archie, The Gopher System, WAIS).
More recent search engines, Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista

Search Engine Optimisation

Contains information regarding the processes involved in determining whether a small business website is suitable for search engine optimisation.

The steps followed are:

• Keyword analysis – assess which keywords appear most commonly when your business services come to mind, these keywords are made sure to be incorporated in the page
• Setting the benchmark – recording of current data and feedback from current site usage
• Link popularity – initial search engine optimisation includes installing quality links from other websites that offer similar services
• Measuring your progress – the provision of regular reporting regarding the progress since your website was search engine optimised.