Integrating Technology in the Foreign Language Classroom

Most search engines work in basically the same way.  They also have provisions for designing simple and advanced searches.  Below are a few general hints for optimizing your search. All search engines provide help pages that explain the details about how they work.  This information can help you save a lot of time when searching the web.

Simple Search

· Use quotation marks to search for a phrase. For fairy tales, search for "once upon a time". Without quotes, you'll just get any pages that use any of those (very common, by the way) words.
· Use as many words as you want to focus the search.  The more information you provide, the more useful the initial results will be. For example, a search for <sandals leather footwear> may be more likely to produce useful results than a search for <sandals> alone. Assuming you want information about leather sandals, that is.
· Normally, common words are excluded from searches, but you can use a plus sign (+) in front of a common word to force the search engine to include it in the results.
· Use a minus sign (-) in front of a word to exclude it from results. Search for information about cats, but not the musical, try +cats -musical. Exclude phrases in the same way: dogs -"going to the".
· Use an asterisk (*) to broaden your search. To find any words that start with gold, use gold* to find matches for gold, goldfinch, goldfinger, and golden.

Choose the Advanced Search option to meet specific or specialized searching needs. For example, you could use the advanced search option to

· construct queries using Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT, NEAR).
· find documents last modified within a specific time frame.
· provide your own ranking words.
· find words located near (within 10 words of) each other.

A few search engines you might wish to try

http://www.google.com/
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://www.alltheweb.com/
http://www.ask.com/
http://www.dogpile.com/
http://search.msn.com/
http://www.lycos.com/
http://www.altavista.com/

You can practice your search skills in the WWW section of the FL Technology Module.  You can do an exercise in general searching plus learn about language-specific search engines.