Great Reference

I think the Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science (ODLIS) is my new best friend!  What a great reference.  Being new to the library has meant a huge learning curve for me.  Many of the day to day operations of my library are fraught with new terms, unexpected "glitches," frequently asked questions that I don't know how to answer, and frustration.  This reference will offer me a place to find the right terminology so that when I look for help my requests are more accurate

How do they do that?

Search Engines are more of a mystery than I thought.  I decided to do some searching on YouTube and TED to see if I could get some help in understanding "how it all works."  I really liked seeing the dynamics of Sergey Brin and Larry Page in this TED talk:

After some initial searching, I sent to our class discussion forum.  This has been a very interesting lesson and discussion to follow.  I definitely learned more from classmates' posts than I did from my initial reading of the lesson.  The posts had me searching and "playing" with search engines that were new to me.

I have to admit that although I thought I understood how a search engine worked, I really didn't care. (yikes, I know)  When I log on to the internet at home or school, Google kindly provides me with an easy search box and off I go.  I really didn't consider that Google is better or that other search engines are better, I just wanted to find what I was looking for, maybe stray a bit to other sites, and then continue on.  Understanding the "spiders" and that when I do a search with Google, I am only searching Google's index will definitely make me a smarter searcher and better able to help my students conduct their research. 

I do wonder how much of this our students need to understand?  I teach high school so I think they will be able to comprehend and appreciate this information, but will they be like me and not really care? Will they take the time to conduct a search using different search engines, different search parameters, different terms?  Or will they think this is all taking too long?  Do they need to delve into the "deep web" for the kind of searching they are doing?

Most of the information I found when trying to better understand how the most popular search engines work, came from the companies themselves, as a type of PR.  Although I found them to be quite informative (I especially like the Matt Cutts' Google video) I do know that they are only telling me what they think I should know.  It is interesting how many people try to explain search engines but their intent is mostly to help web site creators get their site to come up in a Google or Yahoo search.

 

http://www.thesearchenginelist.com/ provided an astounding list of search engines most of which I had never heard of.  It was interesting to read the descriptions and then conduct a search with the same terms on various sites.  Most use the same techniques but some use the larger sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing as their search indexes. 

I'm not sure if this new knowledge about search engines will change my searching techniques dramatically, but like learning about Wikipedia did for me last year, I think I will get better results and be a bit more attentive when I search.  I also think it will be fun to show students how to get different results when searching the internet so that they don't fall into the trap of just accepting that initial Google search.

Something to kick off LIBE 465

If you haven't seen this video you will be amazed. I used it with my Leadership students and we had an inspired discussion. Enjoy :)