In a typical school
project a student is asked to use the Internet to help find information
on
Compare
what did Romans ate for breakfast with what you eat and find two similarities
and two differences. Explain one of the differences, providing reasons
based on availability, preparation, cost, and awareness of food types.
The first search
using the key word
Romans
Some of the sites
were okay but we need to be more specific as 1, 940, 000 sites is a
few too many and the list contained information on sports teams, doctoral
dissertations, projects from other school children and much more in
between.
Our next search
field comes from the creation of a semantic field of terms associated
with the topic. In creating a semantic filed we are always looking for
2-3 word phrases that summarise the topic and give it context. In this
case the term Roman Empire seemed to be a logical choice. By
inserting the term Roman Empire Google automatically assumes
you want both terms in your search i.e. Romans AND Empire not
Romans OR Empire. The result of inserting the field
Roman
Empire
we
get a return of 706, 000 sites.
But what we really
want is the word Roman immediately followed by the word Empire. To insert
this request as a search field we use the search field using the speech
marks. These speech marks are known as an Boolean operator. There are
22 operators that can be used to connect terms in a Boolean search.
The majority of all searches use only three of these operators (""
+ -).
"Roman
Empire"
and
this returns us 439, 000 sites.
As a further refinement
would be that we want information on the themes of breakfast so our
search field becomes:
"Roman
Empire" +breakfast
This
returns us 8980 sites.
The + sign indicates
that we want "Roman Empire" AND breakfast.
Many of these
returns are inappropriate for our year 6 students so we add another
key term; k12 (Kindergarten -Year 12) and our search field becomes
"Roman
Empire" +breakfast +k12
The
result of this is 121 sites
There is a gap
between each search term but none between the operator (" + - etc.)
and the term it applies to.The sites
have a high relevancy for the work being done.
If we found that
a playstation game was appearing in our returned sites and was of no
value we could eliminate it by using the search operator - (minus sign).
Our new search field would become:
"Roman
Empire" +breakfast +k12 -Sony
We
did not use the term game as the same sites that may provide information
on what Romans ate for breakfast may also contain information on Roman
Games.
 |
For
more information see the book
"Surfing
the WEB"
|
