The Boolean Logic, Searching the Internet and Evaluating Websites

1. Welcome Mrs. Powell’s College Comp Students! Sit at any computer and login using your username. Go to http://maldfrontier.blogspot.com/ Think: What is the author of this cartoon saying about the Internet?

2. Respond: Using the link Today’s Meet on Mrs. Maldonado’s Blog – “What is the author of this cartoon saying about the Internet?”

3. Searching with Success Why is how we search the Internet important?

4. Search Engine Information is collected by a computer program and indexes all of the information Provides a huge number of sites Search Directory People, not computers, index information. Editors evaluate Web sites and organize them into subjects. Number of sites are much smaller, but higher quality Search Engine VS Search Directory

5. Your science teacher tells you to find out if mercury is toxic. Type mercury and hitting the enter key. How many pages are retrieved? About 75,000,000 Look over the description of the first few sites. What are they about? Mercury Vehicles Mercury Element Mercury Planet PRACTICE

6. The Boolean Logic Searching technique that can narrow your search to a reasonable number of results, and increase your chance of having useful results Consists of three operators or commands OR AND NOT Conducting a Successful Search

7. AND Means “I want only documents that contain both/all words.” OR Means “I want documents that contain either word.” (AND) NOT Means I want documents that contain this word, but not if the documents contains another word. Boolean Basics

8. Each operator can be visually described by using Venn diagrams. OR logic QUESTION: I would like information about college. college OR university The OR logic retrieves records in which AT LEAST ONE or both of the search terms are present. Boolean Basics

9. AND logic QUESTION: I am interested in the relationship between poverty and crime. poverty AND crime The AND logic retrieves records in which BOTH of the search terms are present. Boolean Basics

10. NOT logic QUESTION: I want information about cats, but I don’t want to see anything about dogs. cats NOT dogs The NOT logic retrieves records in which ONLY ONE of the term is present, excluding records from your search results. Boolean Basics

11. Your science teacher tells you to find out if mercury is toxic. Mercury has many different meanings. How can we use the Boolean operators to narrow down our search? PRACTICE

12. 5 Keys to Evaluating Web Pages

14. What type of domain does it come from?

15. Government - .gov or .mil

16. Educational - .edu

17. Non-profit - .org

18. Who published the page?

19. Have you heard of the agency or person?

21. Determine who wrote the page

22. Looking for someone claiming accountability or responsibility

23. Is the page dated? Is it current enough?

25. Are sources documented with footnotes?

26. Where did the author get their information from?

27. Is the information complete, not altered, fake or forged?

29. View page information

30. Is the page listed in one or more reputable directories or pages?

31. What do others say about the author?

33. The purpose

34. Is it a parody?

35. Is this as creditable and useful as other print resources.