Labs

Lab 3.3: Been Searchin'

Given the vast amount of information on the WWW, it only makes sense that search engines, programs that help us to look through all of the available resources for keywords, have become important tools to WWW users. In this set of exercises, we help you to appreciate the utility of such programs, and to gain experience using them.

  1. In the interest of gaining an appreciation for the utility - and complexity - of search engines, we ask you to do this first exercise by hand. Before the advent of search engines, searching for specific information within, say, a text was a matter of looking items up in the index. It was up to the author(s) of a text to decide which terms would be included in the index, and it was up to the person doing the searching to determine which of potentially many page references for a given term was the most useful.

    Look up the following terms in the index of the Analytical Engine text. You will see that each index entry refers to many pages in the text. For each term, write down the page references in the order in which you whink they should ideally be returned by a search engine (list the most "important" reference first). Then, provide a brief justification for your chosen ordering.

    1. calculator
    2. ENIAC
    3. Alan Turing
    4. World Wide Web

Now it's time to use the search engines that are associated with the WWW at large. Your browser may come with its own built-in search engine, or it may provide you with direct links to one or more of the many that are readily available from their own WWW pages. Use any search engine you like to perform the following exercise.

  1. Locate each of the items below on the WWW. Then, list on a piece of paper the URL at which you found it, and the keywords or phrase you used to initiate the search. If you are using your own machine and browser, you can bookmark any of the pages you wish.
    1. a full page rendering of the portrait of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci
    2. an index of employment opportunities in your chosen (or anticipated) career field
    3. the theme song from "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show"
    4. information about your favorite actor/actress
    5. a position statement by a U.S. representative or senator regarding the Communications Decency Amendment of the 1996 Telecommunications Act
    6. prehistoric cave drawings
    7. a current weather radar report for Tokyo, Japan
    8. product information page for the kind of car you would most want to own
    9. an estimation of the current number of WWW sites

Labs

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