Dont Search - Find November 29, 2006
Posted by Brian in : Uncategorized , trackbackI am just back from a short inservice run by Ollie Bray who is acting depute head here at Musselburgh Grammar School.It was all about different ways to find information on the internet.
Most people think searching begins and end with Google but it seems there are a variety of ways to find what you are looking for.
He spoke about using the advanced features of search engines to narrow down results and how searching for different formats e.g .doc, .ppt, .mp3 etc can sift out all the wheat from the chaff.
It was fascinating to learn about the hidden internet. This is information stored in databases and is invisible to the spiders and robots that the big search engines use to retrieve data. Examples are :-
- Archives (newspapers and magazines, etc.)
- Sites requiring registration or login
- Non-HTML files (PDF files, etc.)
www.clusty.com/ can be used to access the hidden internet
Ollie also pointed out that information on webpages is rarely deleted from the internet even though the webpages cannot be accessed or may not be viewed.
Use http://www.archive.com/ for things that you thought may have been thrown away or never existed in the first place.
At http://www.quintura.com a new way of searching can be found.
Type in your query and you are presented with a “cloud” full of related words. As you choose more words your search is narrowed down and the links appear below the cloud.
The whole session was great fun and a lot was learned. Seaching can be fun, so the next time you feel like need to find something out give one of the other search engines a go.
Its all out there, somewhere, finding an easy way to get to it is half the battle.
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Glad you enjoyed the session I have posted a handout here: http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/2006/11/searching_the_i.html
Cheers for now, Ollie
Great to see local in-service making this sort if impact.