Chapter 14: Class search engines

Introduction Table of contents Chapters 1. Hardware and OS 2. Basic software 3. The Internet 4. Online learning 5. Starting the class 6. The CATE site 7. Checking in 8 Class sites 9. Message lists 10. Quizzes, tests, exams 11. Gradebooks 12. Documents 13. Chat rooms and blogs 14. Class search engines 15. Student configurations Appendices 1. Basic skills checklist 2. CATE skills checklist 3. WebCT 4. SRJC classes 5. Email accounts 6. A day in the life 7. Check your browser 8. Blog tools

SRJC faculty using the CATE system to create class websites have the option to activate a search engine for each class. Depending on configurations selected by the instructor, these can appear near the upper right and/or lower right corner of section homepages, schedule pages, and/or presentation pages (lectures) of class websites. The instructor might choose to place the search engine feature on all, some, or none of those class pages. Topics on this page A. Searching B. More resources C. Self-assessment A. Searching In general, the search engine for a class will find and analyze all pages of a particular class (including individual messages from the class Message List(s) and current contents of the class Chat Room(s)) and display results with links leading to each page. However, because some faculty choose to construct class websites in a non-standard fashion, in some cases not all class pages can be included in the search. In addition, some pages might be closed (temporarily or otherwise) by the instructor and inaccessible, some pages might be password-protected, some pages might be hosted on another server, and some pages might be explicitly excluded from the search process by the instructor. Therefore, situations might occur where some class pages can't be found, accessed, analyzed, displayed, and/or linked. To conduct a search, simply find a class webpage on which your instructor has placed a search box (upper right corner and/or lower right corner of the page), enter the word(s) for which you wish to search, and click the "Go" button. Within a couple of seconds a page of search results will be displayed with the following information: Page searched (with a link if possible) Number of occurrences of the search word(s) on that page Snippets of text containing the search word(s) When initiating a search, by default the system uses the "search as phrase" option. However, you can continue searching using the "all words" or "any word(s)" option. The former only displays pages which contain all your search words, while the latter displays any page which contains at least one of your search words. For example: When searching for "thunder and lightning" as a phrase, the engine only looks for pages which contain all three of those words in a row. When searching for "thunder and lightning" as "all words," the engine looks for pages which contain all three of those words, but not necessarily in a row. When searching for "thunder and lightning" as "any word(s)," the engine looks for pages which contain at least one of those three words. In this case, because the search text includes the word "and," the "any word(s)" search will almost certainly return a large number of useless results. As you can see, carefully considered search terms can greatly improve the utility of the results. Likewise, spelling counts! If you're not sure of the spelling, you might want to search for just a fragment of the word(s) about which you're uncertain. After initiating a search, you can look through the results and follow any link, you can continue searching from the search results page, or you can use the "Return to class page" link at any time to return directly to the page where the search was initiated. In all cases, it's important to remember that the class search engine feature only searches pages specific to the class website. It does not search other pages on the CATE server, the SRJC server, or elsewhere on the Web. B. More resources CATE homepage C. Self-assessment Take the self-assessment quiz to ensure you're comfortable with all the concepts and skills in this chapter. The quiz will open in a new browser window, and after submitting the quiz you'll immediately see your score. Practice exercise: If your instructor has placed a search engine on any of your class pages, run some practice searches to see how it works.

 

Distance Education office Santa Rosa Junior College, Santa Rosa, CA USA Last Modified: Tuesday, 10-Feb-2009 09:13:30 PST	Email to CATE Webmaster