Time |
Activity |
5
min. |
Review
- Review Lesson #2: Three steps for Internet research
- Review subscription databases and subject directories
|
15
min. |
What is a Search Engine and How Does it Work?
- Robots ("Spiders, Webcrawlers")
- No more human selection
- Collection rather than selection—everything on the Web is included in a search
- Show Google and show number of sites indexed (at bottom of front page) and number of hits for a key word (e.g. "Columbus").
|
10
min. |
Getting Results
- Getting results with a search engine vs. subject directory
- Search engine gives many irrelevant hits
- Subject directory gives fewer but more focused results
- Let students check comparison of hits between a directory and a search engine for a specific topic
- Emphasize that fewer is better!
|
10 min. |
Additional Examples
- Specific examples of search results
- any current classroom topic
- "explorer"
- What if the librarian were a search engine crawler? (Show examples of books that have irrelevant content but include the search term.)
- Student exploration time to try searches on current class topics, personal research topics, or both, using both subject directories and search engines.
|
15 min. |
Now You Try It!
- Student partners work together to search for their explorer by name in each of the following:
- Subscription database
- Subject directory
- Google
- Record the number of hits for each search on the Now You Try It! worksheet. (also in PDF format)
- Write down which search method would be the best choice for correcting the wrong info at AAE and why.
|
5
min. |
Summary & Preview of Next Lesson
- Review and emphasize that search engines are completely programmed—no human judgement or evaluation is done for you.
- Next lesson will focus on how to navigate on the Web and evaluate web sites.
|
