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Super Searcher Course Outline

Course Outline

Welcome, Introductions and review of handouts. (5 Min.)

Pretest Word doc (5 Min.)

Discussion of tools that are currently used (10 Min.)

What specialized tools do you use? How did you find them? Where would you look for a new tool?

Yahoo's list of search engines (10 Min.)

http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Searching_the_Web/Search_Engines_and_Directories/

Five types of Recommended Search Tools

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

http://www.searchtools.com/

Search Tools Chart

Discussion and review of evaluation sites (30 Min.)

http://searchengineshowdown.com/
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/facts/ataglance.html
http://www.pandia.com
http://www.infopeople.org/search/chart.html
Best Search Engines Quick Guide
http://library.albany.edu/internet/choose.html

Keeping up with the new features

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Mailing_Lists_and_Newsletters/

Blogs/rss feeds that are either totally or partially dedicated to search technologies.

http://cical.blogspot.com/
http://cical.blogspot.com/
http://www.google.com/googleblog/
http://google.blogspace.com/
http://www.llrx.com/
http://www.researchbuzz.org/
http://www.resourceshelf.com/
http://www.searchenginelowdown.com/
http://searchenginewatch.com/
http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/

Break (15 Min.)

Student exercises 1

Students will review three of the following sites: (40 Min.)

Consider the following questions as you review three sites. Exercise worksheet Word doc
Select one site from each group below to review.

Group A

Group B

Group C

Review and hands-on exercises - Advanced search features in general Internet search engines (30 Min.)

All about Google (40 Min.)

Metasearch and Specialized Search

Advanced search features

Special searching discussion:

Power searching with customized settings saved using cookies.

Looking for current information and news

News

Blogs & RSS

Podcasts

  • Podcasting News Search-this is my favorite. You can browse categories and enter a search for topics you are interested in. This is a site I recommend. The site also includes lists of New Podcasts, Top 25 Podcasts, Highest Recommended Podcasts, and other
  • Podcast Alley - this is another site where you can browse by category and search for podcasts.
  • PodcastDirectory.com
  • Yahoo Podcast Search (Beta)
  • Podscope - this is relatively new and searches the content of poscasts. It is a Beta version so I am sure improvements are on the way. Seems to work best with simple and broad search terms. Keep checking back for improvements.

Searching the past???

Quality Filtering

Review as a quality filter. What are the pros and cons of this approach?

Specialized search tools (20 min.)

Guides to Specialized Search Engines

Beyond text searching (20 min.)

What do we need to search other media? Is text best? Why?

http://www.singingfish.com/ - index of streaming media
http://www.inxight.com/products/vizserver/ Demos are at the left - NASA History

The future of searching discussion (10 min.)

What others are searching

New

http://www.zoominfo.com/ Zoominfo
NPR archive
http://www.oyez.org/oyez/frontpage - contains more than TWO THOUSAND hours of Supreme Court audio, including every audio the Court has recorded since 1995.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/international/portals.html Portals to the World contains selective links providing authoritative, in-depth information about the nations and other areas of the world. http://yp.a9.com/-/company/YellowPages.jspCurrent List of Cities Having Block View Images

Wrap up - posttest Word doc, CE evaluations Word doc and distribute certificates (if available) (10 Min.)

This course has been approved for 4 hours of Medical Library Association Continuing Education Units.