Web Searching for Teachers or Students

The Web vs. VIVA:  According to two recent surveys reported in Syllabus magazine during August and September, 1998, between 80 and 98 percent of teachers use the internet to prepare their coursework. 

The Web offers source material that ranges from popular to professional, as does VIVA, with a broader range of subjects but more sporadic topic coverage.  Web searches often yield a higher proportion of irrelevant "hits" than VIVA searches, but sophisticated search engines are now available for both.  Your students have remote access to VIVA and the Web via their modems at home; like you, your students have on-campus access to both VIVA and the Web through the faster network lines provided by the college.
;

Picture from a Britannica Online feature article. Picture credit = Simon Fisher.  From Titanic: Legacy of the World's Greatest Ocean Liner  © Copyright Tehabi Books and RMS Titanic, Inc.

VIVA offers

• Britannica Online: thousands of articles, dictionary entries, biographies, illustrations, and over 700 in-depth articles (including a few feature articles linked from the opening page like the September, 1998, feature on the Titanic), plus relevant internet links.
• First Search: abstracts and indexes of databases
• Ideal: academic journals in the sciences, social sciences, and business
• Newsbank: searchable text articles from 500+ newspapers
• SIRS Researcher: full-text newspaper and newsmagazine articles
• Searchbank: abstracts for easy-to-find periodical articles and full-text articles for harder-to-find periodicals

The Web offers

• millions of articles
• tons of opinion in articles, chats, and discussion forums
• skads of photos
• collections of graphics, some free, some free with a credit line, some copyrighted
• some email connections to sources or copyright holders
• millions of distractions (aka "serendipitous learning opportunities")

Searching the Web

Click on the Netscape flashlight or use the bookmarks or menu provided for searching.
Netscape runs a search engine at its website.  It also packages some popular search engines with its browser, as does Internet Explorer.  What's the difference among these various search engines?  The best way to learn is to use the same term in each one and try out the first few "hits" on each search result list. That exercise could take a couple hours, especially if you make notes for yourself. In general, Excite lists summaries of sites that its staff has seen, Lycos is the oldest, Yahoo! lists categories with a few hits in each.

HotBot and LookSmart allow Boolean searches.  Some newer search sites will sample searches from each of the major search engines, such as MetaSearch at Highway 61 and North Slope.

The most reliable I have found for academic subjects is Infoseek.  Although it doesn't give summaries like Excite but just quotes the first few lines of a site, it does stack and group "hits" with percentages of likelihood for relevance, tells the total number of hits, as Excite does, and breaks the lists into "pages" of 10 at a time (Excite lists 20 per page).  Infoseek, unlike other search engines, allows you to narrow your searches by searching only the items on your first result list.
/

/
In the example above, the term "gross national product" was typed into the seek blank with quotation marks so that the engine wouldn't search for each word separately and the seek button was clicked.  The number of references Infoseek found on the Internet was 4,902, which is a lot to look at.  To narrow the search, I wondered what percentage of the GNP is spent on medical related expenses, since one of the first 10 hits was about that topic.

The resulting list of 104 hits was headed by slides from the middle of a graphic presentation on GNP showing 5% of the GNP for medical services in 1960 and 12% in 1990.  Other hits related to political candidates, hunger, and less relevant issues.

Time for you to try out your own interests in a couple of search engines in the exercise below.

Exercise:  Think of one or two terms in your field and try out two or three of the search engines listed in your browser.  (Or look up "constructivism" and focus on hits having to do with education or higher education or college.)

© 1998 by J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College.  See the sitemap for permissions.