today's lesson is going to be about using the internet for research first let's get some terminology out of the way what is the difference between a search engine and a website a search engine is a computer program that collects and organizes content from all over the Internet there are many different kinds of search engines you are probably most familiar with Google think of a search engine like a filing cabinet it stores all sorts of information a website then is just one particular file inside the search engine the search engine takes your Search terms and tries to organize the websites in a way it thinks it might be best for you when you're using a search engine like Google remember a couple things first Enter key wordss try to make sure they're spelled correctly although most search engin are starting to become more forgiving with this try to avoid long sentences or questions again more search engines are allowing for longer searches try to use a plus statement if you have two key words that you want to put together if you use the word or it will make make sure it searches either of your Search terms be clear in your online searches try to use more than one word to describe what you're looking for for example if we search the word mercury and Mercury only what do you think might come up remember that our search engine's going to look all over the Internet for the keyword Mercury we could be searching for the planet Mercury but our search engine doesn't knows that so it could pull up things about the car something related to temperature or the Mercury that's used in thermometers maybe that's searching for mercury that's found in fish if our project is about the planet Mercury try searching the terms planets plus Mercury then we know that we're getting all the web page related to the planet let's try that example so I pulled up Google this is my search engine let's type in Mercury the first couple hits that I get this one is about the element mercury this one is more accurate it's about the planet so is this one ah but here this one's about cars this is about the company Merc your marine and an insurance company the EPA measuring levels of mercury so you can see that there are many different kinds of hits that you would get if you just typed in one keyword let's go back and change that let's add planets we could either type the word and or we could type a plus sign look at our top hit they are all related to the planet Mercury if I was doing a report about the planet Mercury how would I know which one of these websites might work work out best that's going to take us to the next part of our lesson so the next part of the lesson is looking at the actual websites websites are the pages that come up as a result of the Search terms you put into the search engine remember they're like the individual file folders inside of that filing cabinet let's take a look here at what might come up if we did a search on Thomas Jefferson each of these titles in blue represents a different web page about Thomas Jefferson how do we know which one to choose to look at for our report well I want to talk to you a little bit about evaluating websites we're going to use an acronym C or car R each of these letters is going to represent something that we're looking for on the website to make sure it's good for schoolwork the C is going to represent credibility the A is for accuracy and the r is for reasonable so how do we know if a site is credible accurate or reasonable first we'll look at the author does the article even have an author and if it does how are they related to the topic does it show their experience working with the topic do they work for a university or organization that you know is credible next we're going to look at the web address itself if the end in. edu. org or.
gov we know that we might find less advertising on that page and less links that might get us off track we next want to look at the web site of itself and see if it has a familiar Source something that you've heard of before like maybe a news station like NBC news or National Geographic or PBS or USA Today or Scholastic some organization that you know is familiar let's go with accuracy next one thing that we can do is look at the copyright or when the page was last updated the more current the better then then we want to read the page some of the information on the page should sound familiar so facts that you've read in other places should match what you're reading now on this website also good websites will also site where they're getting their information from so for example at the bottom of the web page they will list their sources of information let's go to reasonable many websites today have a lot of advertising or links to pages that have nothing to do with what you're looking on a lot of them can be very distracting so good websites for research are those that have little or no advertising the web page that you're looking at should be fact-based you don't want to be reading about other people's opinions their blogs or comments from other readers this can be confusing and kind of Muddy the facts that you're trying to look [Music] up let's go back to our Mercury example so we typed in Mercury in our Google search engine then we have a list of web pages now the first one that comes up is Wikipedia you can see here in the green web address we're going to talk a little bit more about w wikipedia in a little bit the next couple Pages if you look at the web address that can give you a hint whether or not it's going to be good for research our first web address ends ingov and so does the next one. goov and this we can also see it says for students that one might be one we go to right away so if we click on the page some of the things that we're looking for are an author a copyright and a familiar Source well I'm sure everyone is just about everyone is familiar with NASA it's a governor organization that studies space so right there we've got the familiarity piece taken care of next let's look for an author on the top of the page we don't see anyone's name no author credit or written by let's check the bottom of the page it looks like there's a person's name right here but it doesn't say written by so I'd be a little cautious naming that person as the author I don't see any other names down here besides the Nash NASA official and the page editor which does not give a specific name so we may have to skip an author for now but I do see some information that's pretty important when the page was last updated it's pretty current so this would be good for our um accuracy let's move on to some of the other pages that we saw on that list so the first two after the Wikipedia were government pages this next one lists National Geographic we know that's a good source for kids the next one here says fact monster. com I've never heard of this organization and it ends in a.
com many times organizations that have websites for business end. com and what I mean by that is that if it's a business somebody's trying to make money and look around this page there's lots of advertising it's really distracting in does that mean this page is bad well let's take a look well fact monster we can click on them and figure out who they are again more advertising but let's look for authors or information about the company if I go down to the bottom of the page and I can look at how to site fact monster in my report it tells me that I'm getting information from almanacs articles encyclopedias dictionaries so this might actually be a reputable Source cuz it's pulling information from other reputable sources and putting it all in one web page for me I also know that it's part of Pearson Education which is a is a publishing company and it also lists a copyright so this one although it's very distracting with all of its ads May provide some good information for me in one spot it's pulling off information from encyclopedias and so forth let's go back to our list this web address looks a little confusing but it does end an edu so let's take a look hm just two paragraphs about the planet Mercury and I don't see an author and I don't see a copyright if I click on the homepage and read this little bit at the top in this semester of astronomy oh this is someone's class they have their whole or all their lessons online I don't think I want to sort this uh site this as a source it doesn't even list who's teaching this class so probably not a good website for my research let's take a look at the next one astronomy. com astronomy for kids is helpful I know it might be at a reading level that's good for me but I don't know much about this organization astronomy.
