Web Searching And Social Bookmarking
By Engage

The SIESWE Learning Technology Team present the first of a series of articles on the potential of different learning technologies to support formal and informal learning for the social services workforce…

According to Google, there are over 8 billion web pages available on the open internet! Although internet search engines like Google make a fantastic job of imposing order on this overwhelming amount of information, there are a few tips and tricks that can help improve your search strategies.

There are now tools that allow you to easily store and share the results of your search with colleagues. When looking for something on the web, you need to use a search engine. Although there are many different search engines Google is probably the most popular (google.co.uk) and will be the focus of discussion here.

Search Terms

The first thing to decide when locating information on the web is your search terms. These are simply the keywords that describe the topic you’re searching for (e.g. child protection, youth justice, parental substance misuse, advocacy, learning disabilities, homelessness).

It pays to take some time to think about your search terms and to be as specific as you can. This will reduce the number of results you need to look through.

Using Quote Marks

If you’re searching for a specific title or piece of text, you can focus your search by putting quote marks (“ ”) around your search terms. The search engine will then locate all pages with words or phrases that match the search terms in the same order as they appear in the phrase, e.g. searching on social work returns pages containing the word social and the word work anywhere and in any order in the page; but searching on “social work” in quotes will return only pages containing the phrase “social work”. You can combine key words in quotes with other key words without quotes, e.g. “social work” disability.  

Advanced Search

Once you know the basics of Google search, you might want to try Advanced Search, which offers options for making your searches even more precise and returning more focussed results. Advanced search gives you the option to search only for web pages:
– that contain ALL the search terms you type in
– that contain the exact phrase you type in
– that contain at least one of the words you type in
– that do NOT contain any of the words you type in
– written in a certain language
– created in a certain file format (e.g. PDF, Powerpoint, Word)
– that have been updated within a certain period of time
– that contain numbers within a certain range
– within a certain domain, or website (e.g. .gov.uk, sieswe.org) – that don’t contain ‘adult’ material

To look at the other advanced search features, see Google’s guide at: tinyurl.com/yvqoff

Geography

If you know the resource you’re searching for is UK based, you can select the ‘pages from the UK’ button, under the Google search box. Again, this is a way of narrowing down the number of results returned.

Google Images

Google offers a selection of specialised services including Google Images (images.google.co.uk) which offers a more effective way of finding images than simply adding words like ‘pics’ or ‘pictures’ to your search terms when you do a regular web search.  To ensure image searches don’t return inappropriate content go to the Google preferences page and ensure that Google’s SafeSearch is turned on. Remember too that web-based images – like other webbased content – are protected by copyright law. If you’re searching for images that you can use without breaching copyright look for content that has a Creative Commons license (see below).

Google Scholar

Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a way of licensing works (text, images, music or video) that enables the creators of the work to protect their rights, but at the same time gives permission to other users to make use of the work. From the Creative Commons web site authors choose one of a number of licences that specify whether commercial use or the creation of derivative works are allowed (for more detailed information about Creative Commons see SIESWE Learning Technology Infosheet #3 on Creative Commons).

You can search for works licensed using Creative Commons from the Creative Commons search engine (search.creativecommons.org); and there is a useful feature incorporated into the Firefox internet browser (mozilla.com/en-US/firefox) that allows users to search for resources licensed under Creative Commons.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a way of keeping track of your favourite websites, articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes and more, accessing them from any computer on the web and sharing them with others.

There are several social bookmarking sites but del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) is probably the most popular. Instead of bookmarking favourites inside your browser, del.icio.us allows you to quickly and easily save your favourite sites to the del.icio.us website and then choose whether or not to share your favourites with friends, family, co-workers, and the del.icio.us community.

You organise the bookmarks saved on del.icio.us by adding keywords (or ‘tags’). These can be any words you like, and you can use as many as you like, so there’s no need to navigate complicated hierarchies of folders and categories when looking through your favourites.  

Del.icio.us shows you all the tags you’ve ever used, so it’s easy to get back to a reference once you’ve saved it. Looking at someone else’s bookmarks on a specific keyword can provide a very effective introduction to a new topic.

To use del.icio.us you will need to download and install a free plugin from del.icio.us (del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension) which puts the del.icio.us tagging icon on your search engine toolbar.  

Then, when you next find something you want to bookmark simply click the tag icon, which automatically takes you to your own del.icio.us webpage. Add a couple of keywords or tags and the resource is added to your collection of favourites.

Related Internet Links:

This series of articles are reproduced from information sheets created by the SIESWE Learning Technology Team and published here with the permission of SIESWE.