This is a good start. You could do much better, however, if you clicked on the "Advanced Search" link on the right hand side of the search field. Once the page downloads this is what you will see.

 

If you look closely at the options you will see you can refine your search by specifying phrases and even excluding terms from a search.

For example if you commenced a search simply using the words "ancient" and "Athens" you would obtain results with pages that:

Not all of the results would be suitable.

However if you type the phrase "ancient Athens" in the second search field illustrated above, "Find results with the exact phrase", you will obtain results that feature web pages with that exact phrase.

You may like to refine the search even further by typing in the word "Georgia" in the fourth search field illustrated above, "Find results without the words". You will obtain results that do not feature many web pages with mention of the city of Athens, Georgia in the United States.

Additional refinements available on the Advanced Search page …

If you look closely at the screen shot above you will see that there are additional refinements that can assist you to narrow your search results to a better set of worthwhile or meaningful web sites.

Four NETS for Better Searching

This is an excellent web site designed to assist with getting the most out of your Internet search. It complements the tips outlined above.

Four NETS for Better Searching

 

Search engines other than Google ~ Kartoo and Vivisimo

Have you tried 'Kartoo' that presents your results as an interactive concept map or ''Vivisimo' that clusters and organises your results into categories?

 

When you perform a serach using Kartoo you can choose between 'UK pages' or the 'world wide web'. Sometimes the choice is 'English pages'. Kartoo provides an interesting way in which to search for information on the Internet.

It displays the results of your search in two formats. One representation is a structured concept map of the results that categorises results according to relevance and significance. An example is shown below.

 

Kartoo also represents the data as a set of categorised links to the left of the interactive map. See the example below. Visually minded learners may prefer to use this search engine.

As you can see with the results below a search on 'Ancient Athens' brings up a set of categorised results. That could be very useful both for the teacher and the student.

 

Domains

Keep in mind the significance of the various domain name descriptors:

Which ones do you think will contain the most credible information for teachers and students? You can specify that only pages with specific domains are the source of your results in a Google advanced search. See the screen shot below.

… and there are others of course (tv, biz, id, etc)

In the example illustrated below a phrase search on the term 'ancient Athens' is restricted to sites that include the descriptor '.edu' in the domain name.

 

Meta-search engines

A meta serach sends your search to multiple search engines simulatenously. It collects the results and then displays them for your further investigation.

Visit this web site at the University of California in Berkeley for an excellent description and review of meta-search engines.

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/MetaSearch.html

Searching for images

A number of school district and regions have filtered Google images so that students are not unwittingly bombarded with inappropriate images. It is not possible to access Google images in some schools as a result.

If you do use Google to search for images on the Internet then you should try Google's Advanced Image search. You can refeine your search with specific terms as with a word search. You can also specify various characteristics for the images including:

In addition to these specifications you can also specify the domain for your search as well as providing three different levels of filtering:

See the screen shot below.

 

Alternative image search sites on the Internet

When searching for images it is also possible to use dedicated image hosting services such as ‘Photobucket’, ‘Web Shots’ or ‘Flickr’. Each of these sites have usage policies that ensure that inappropriate images are not placed online or, in the event that they are, members of the public can report the abuse and they will be removed.

You can search these galleries for images of countries, towns, cities and places that may be useful for your project. Recently I located a large selection of excellent high resolution photographs of Pompeii following a search in Photobucket.

Wikipedia

What is Wikipedia? This is an online encyclopaedia that is constantly being updated by experts and enthusiasts that are interested in the topics displayed in its pages. It is also an good source of information for current news events.

It should be considered as a method for quickly obtaining information on a topic and not as a 100% credible source of information. Quite often the Internet links at the foot of a Wikipedia article can be very useful.

Wikipedia pages can be a source of misinformation as well since anyone can edit a page in Wikipedia. It can include pages with biased views. News reports have revealed how politicians, celebrities and other individuals have created and/or modified entries regarding themselves and others in a self serving and subjective manner.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.