Week 3 Activity 6816

Literacy Quiz with my answers

. List 4 major search engines and a major directory.
Google, bing, yahoo, ??
2. What is a blog?
An entry from an individual about a certain topic or their opinion on something.  People can provide comments to the blog.
3. Why might you use quotation marks when conducting a search?
To search for something particular or a quote.
4. URL is an acronym for…
?
5. Identify three Boolean search terms.
?
6. How do you find the owner or publisher of a Web site?
Look at the bottom of the page or under the contact us section of the site if possible.
7. Identify these extensions and what they represent:
.org(organization)     .com(commercial)
.sch      .k12(school)
.edu(college/university)     .gov(government)
.ac      .net(network)
.mil(military)     .co
8. How do you find out who is linked to your school’s Web site?
?
9. What clues in a Web address might indicate you are on a personal Web site?
.com
10. How would you conduct a search for the following: a list of Web sites of all the academic institutions in South Africa? (Hint: South Africa’s country code is .za)
Use a search engine
11. How do you find the history of any given Web site?
Look at the websites information at the bottom of the page
12. How would you conduct a search for the following: US higher education Web sites that contain the word turtle?
Type US higher education web sites and “turtle”
13. How do sites get to the top of a result list in Google?
The site at the top is the most visited. 

Answers to Questions I missed:

1.  ask.com; InfoSpace

4.  Uniform Resource Locator

5.  And, Or, Not

6.  Go to www.easywhois.com and enter the URL of the site you would like to research.

7.  .com – company
.sch – school (used outside of US)
.ac – higher ed outside of US usually used with country code, example, “.ac.uk”
.net – network

.co – Company (if paired with a country code, example “.co.uk,” the state of Colorado or the country, Columbia)

8.  Go to Google: www.google.com and do a link: command search. In the search box type link:your school’s address.

9.  Look for a tilde “~” or the “%” sign or a personal name “jdoe” or the word “user” after the domain name and the first forward slash “/“

10.  Go to Google: www.google.com and type site:ac.za in the search box

11.  Use the Wayback Machine. Go to www.archive.org and type the URL of the web site you would like to research into the search box.

12.  Go to Google: www.google.com and type “site:edu + turtle” in the search box.

I chose to look at the website transitofvenus.org.  This website was the fourth website listed when I used Google to and searched for the Transit of Venus.  This website was listed after the website produced from NASA.  The first thing I noticed about the webpage was that it had a domain name that included a .org, so I knew that it might be a good source.  I looked for the author of the page, and was directed to a page that described that he was an education professional.  He had good credentials, so I would trust his work.  The website was created in 2001 and received a lot of traffic around 2004 when the last transit of Venus occurred. 

I learned that there are easy ways to check is a website is valid.  First I would check the domain name to see if it was created by just anyone, check the extension, then I would look at the history and author of the website.  It is not that hard to determine if a website is credible, you just need about five minutes.  I definitely learned a lot from this assignment.