ICT for Language Teachers en dos idiomas: Search Strategies

This one can be a good webpage to work with our students.
http://bscw.fit.fraunhofer.de

Google. Some helpful hints when googling.

- "I'm feeling lucky" takes you directly to the most important place, the first one.

- Punctuation: ignored by Google = for the most part except for apostrophes, hyphens and quotation marks. So for commonly hyphenated or compound words, it is worth running the search a few ways e.g. try “bowtie”, “bow-tie” and “bow tie”.

- Whole phrase matches: put them in quotation marks.

- "Searching within results", adding another word.

- Just say ‘No’. Google lets you use a minus sign or hyphen (-) to indicate that you do not want a certain term to appear in your results. (example: "compact disc -car -Connection")

- Don't include "and", "to", "in", "where", "how"... They are ignored by google. To force google to include these words, you could add "+"

- If you don't remember something, you can write * or ? to replace a word, but not to replace a part of a word.

- If you look for quotations, song lyrics..., we could use the asterisc, the quotation marks and apart from that, add the word "lyrics"

- If you want to know when something happen, don't ask "When did it happen?", say "It happened in *" or "It happened every * years"

Narrowing the search:

- "Google scholar" is http://scholar.google.com/ . It only goes to academic paper references. It includes some things such as: "cited by ...(a number)" It shows how many people have mentioned this article in their web, how important it is.

- .doc is a document of word .html is the language used by web pages

. pdf is "public domain format". It has got higher quality.

- You can say:

filetype:pdf site:.edu "English for Engineers" (there is a space between pdf and site and another one between edu and the quotation mark)

This could be to narrow the search. Just looking for pdf documents in educational sites. But we should only use the quotations if we know the exact name.

If you ask for html, it would be all the websites.

Another example: filetype:pdf OR doc site:.edu "English for teachers"

Other uses:

1. If you don't know the meaning of the word "bicker", go to google and type: define bicker

Another possibility to make sure of the site: encephalitis definition site:edu.

2. How many miles are five kms? Try 5 kilometers in miles 5 kilos in pounds

Other search engines:

if you want audio and video searches, use: www.alltheweb.com www.altavista.com

or www.dogpile.com Google is not very good at these things.

http://Vivisimo.com Here, you can see clustering of results. It puts the result into groups.

http://google-watch.org/

http://scroogle.org