USING WEB SITES

Using websites (ELT lecture at the academy) by Dr Albashir Ahmed 2012

—  Search engines:

—  Of these Google is the most well-known and which indexes over twelve billion web pages.

—   The key to good searching in Google is to define you keywords properly. Try this:

1. Search for ELT . How many results have you got?
2. Now make you search more specific; ELT technology. How many results have you got?
3.  Make it even more specific : ELT technology in Libya: How many results have you got?

·         Another useful technique is to use the ‘phrase’ search technique which involves wrapping part of a phrase in inverted commas which ensures that Google will treat the whole phrase as a single unit and not as individual words.  

·         For example, you want some information about Shakira. You want to now where she was born.

·         If you try Shakira, how many results will you get?

·         Now try the phrase  “Shakira was born”. How many results have you got?

·         Subject guide:

• Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) claims to index twenty billion pages.
• Search in Yahoo is a little different from that of Google. In Google we search for keywords while in Yahoo we search for titles.
• Yahoo derives its description as a subject guide from the fact that it divides its content into subject areas and subdivisions of these areas.
• Thus instead of a keyword search from the main page, users browse the section which best reflects their interests, and then search. 

—  To find information about Shakira, try this

1. Click on the more dropdown list at the top of the Yahoo main page and choose Directory.
2. Click on Entertainment, then Music then Artists.
3. Finally search for Shakira biography making sure to select the this category option.

—  What this essentially means is that Yahoo will only search in ‘Entertainment – Music – Artist’ rather than its entire directory.

—  Real language search:

—  A real language search such as Ask (www.ask.com) allows to type simple questions as search queries.

—  Try the question When was Shakira born?

—  A search on Ask should give you a results page with the answer to your question at the top and links to relevant sites below that.

—  Make sure that you learners use and benefit from all types of search.

Keywords are good for exploring word relationships and lexical areas. Subject searches help define and refine ideas and contexts. A real search can provide useful practice in question formation

—  In addition to these general websites there are specialist sites as a source of information such as:

-          Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) for queries related to movies.

-          Amson site (www.amazon.com) for queries related to books.

-          FIFA site (www.fifa.com) for information related to football World Cup.

—  There are also subject- or media-specific search sites such as:

-          http://images.google.com/ to search a collection of images.

-          http://video.search.yahoo.com/ to search video material.

-          http://www.altavista.com/video  similar to the above site.

-          http://www.altavista.com/audio/default to search for a collection of audio material.

-          http://search.singingfish.com/sfw/home.jsp which contains both video and audio collection.

-          http://tv.blinkx.com/ which allows to search popular TV broadcasters like the BBC and CNN for short video clips.

—  There are also meta sites which allow you to search more than one engine at the same time. Examples are:

-          http://www.dogpile.com/ Dogpile

-          http://www.kartoo.com/ KartOO

-          http://www.mamma.com/ Mamma