My notes
- Wiki
- How to edit a page (Class Blogs)
- How to add a link to another page
- How to print a page
- Formatting tips
- Registering as an author
- Participation
In class
Slides
To do after class
Exercises
- Search engine comparison. Search for [climate change] at each of the following search engines. What types of information are returned by each? How do they differ from each other?
- Other search engines. Again search for [climate change]. What information is captured by these search engines? When would you use either one of these search engines?
- Search for [gerald ford] but not [automotive] and not [cars]. Where does this make more sense and work better?
- Search for pages that have [“climate change”] in the page title (Google & Yahoo)
- Search for [climate change] but only get results from epa.gov (Google & Yahoo)
- Search for [climate change] but only get results from government sites (Google & Yahoo)
- Search for [climate change] but only get results for sites that have [news] in the URL (Google & Yahoo)
- Search for pages that link to http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ (Google & Yahoo)
- Get general information about the URL http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/
- Search for information about financial information about Ford (stock symbol “F”) (Google & Yahoo)
- Get encyclopedia information about [climate change] (Yahoo)
Resources
- Open Directory Project
- Gigablast
- LookSmart
- Ask (also accessed by askjeeves.com and teoma.com; they all get you to the same page now)
- Interesting stuff from WebmasterWorld
- Search Engine Land
- Google search tools
- Google cheat sheet
- End Of Size Wars? Google Says Most Comprehensive But Drops Home Page Count, Sept 2005.
- A Comparison of the Size of the Yahoo! and Google Indices, 2005 : From their conclusion: “Based on the data created from our sample searches, this study concludes that for a random set of words a user can expect, on average, to receive 65% more results using the Google search engine than the Yahoo! search engine. In fact, in the 10,034 test cases we ran, only in 16% of the cases (1606) did Yahoo! return more results. In 83.7% of the cases (8399) Google returned more results. In less than 1% of the cases both search engines returned the same number of results.”
- According to Google ‘Three Times Larger’ Than Nearest Rival & More Q&A With Google’s Marissa Mayer, Google has four key components to search that it focuses on: comprehensiveness, relevance, speed, and user experience.
Separate computer-related “office hours”
I will try to make myself especially available in my office this week. I’ll be available to help talk you through the options related to installing software on your own computer. I’ll be available to discuss just about anything in WSG3, including browsers, search toolbars, bookmarklets, text editors, and wikis. If you want to come by at some specific time, please contact me by email and we’ll see what we can work out.
Student notes
September 10, 2007
BIT 330 Class Notes
Tricks about using stikipad
- If you want to put a link to anything, just put url of the website within the brackets
- If you want to put a link to you bio on stickipad, you simply put “
me ” without the quotes or spaces
- If you want to print something, there is a print button at the bottom of the page that will delete all the information on the right hand side
- If you get confused at any point while editing a page, there is a formatting tips tabs in each edit section that gives help with editing
Assignments for class
- Under the participation sign up category, each person in the class needs to sign up for two slots or dates under the four tables: 2a. Chapter Notes & Questions, 2b. Class Notes, 2c. Google Weekly Update, 2d. Yahoo Weekly Update
- There are 67 total sign ups and around 30 students so in the end you may be able to sign up for a third participation credit
- Each time you sign up you reduce your required blogs by 2 (you are required to do 12 blogs throughout the semester.
Introduction to Web Search
- Information retrieval is steadily changing over time
- Used to be that only professionals could find information of the internet
- Then came along search engines: Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Google
- We are going to begin to learn how to user different search tools
- The content of information retrieval has gotten more complex
- Full text search engines attempt to index the whole page while subject indexes use information about the page
- Search engines can be classified by their default treatment of multiple term queries
- Can be classified by what part of the web that it searches
- Precision and Recall
- Good precision – Low percentage of documents but every one was of interest
- Good recall – what percentage of document that I was interested in did I get back
- Most people are interested in if there question is answered or find what they are looking for so they are concerned with precision – they don’t care if they get 10 million documents because they are only going to read five
- At bottom of page on Google it has searches related to whatever you searched
- You can enter specific conditions for your search that refine the query
The rest of the class we did the exercises that are listed on stickipad.
Put any notes from the class that you want to remember here. If someone has already put something here, then feel free to add to it.