Digital Blog Post D -Chapter 5

There are three different ways to search the internet, according to Chapter 5 of Transforming Learning with New Technologies. Free-text search, or full-text search, is the first form of searching described in the book. This type of search looks for the title, keyword, and description fields related to each word or resource you type into the search command. This type of searching is considered the most inclusive, this is because it tries to included as many things that relate to the words of topic you are searching. Free-text search is like google, an example of this is if you were to type the word "puppies" into a free-text search it would give you a lot of information on different types of puppies, and anything else related to the topic. This basically means that you will get many entries covering many different aspects of what you are searching for. This type of search function is great to use when first looking for information because of the wide variety of results, but it can also be time consuming. Since there are so many results it would be difficult to look through all of them, to figure out which ones you are actually able to use. For this reason, most people tend to use the two other ways to search the internet. These forms are keyword/exact match search and Boolean searches.

Keyword or exact match searches retrieve information based off the exact words or phrase that you put into the text box. Therefor, the word/phrase has to appear either in the title, as a keyword, or in the description fields of a resource for it to be included in the results. An example would be if you want to find information on how to train a puppy, you would have to put that in the text box with quotes around the words ("how to train a puppy").  This type of search function would be extremely useful to students in secondary and post secondary schooling because it would allow them to type the title of an article and find it vary easily. Also, the results would be more limited to what you search, and therefor it would be easier to find the webpages/articles that you would be able to use.

The final search function is Boolean search. This form of search uses the words AND, OR, and NOT to create a more complex search. The reason that it does this is because OR is less restrictive, because it will include any and all words or phrases joined by an exclusive OR. The word AND is also more restrictive because the search results must include all and any phrases that are joined by the word AND. Finally, NOT is used to exclude a certain word. An example would be if you were to search "puppies NOT cute puppies". Another example provided by the book is if you were to search "war NOT civil war". This type of search function would also be useful to students because it would limit search results and allow people to get a clear picture of what sources they can use.



By: Laura Ruiz on Worditout.com

 

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.