Internet Communication

We have been investigating how to refine our internet searches, including being purposeful in the search engine of our choice. Year Six would like to share our key findings from the first part of this learning:

You can search in the address bar at the top of the page, or in the search box. (Fraser) 

Your search will find what you ask for! Add more detail and your search will be closer to what you want. (Phoebe)

Tim Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web to connect scientists across the world. (Olivia).

Some search engines are made especially with children in mind to help them to search more safely, like Duck, Duck, Go. (Arul)

It's interesting that you can buy 'clicks' from Google so that you end up nearer the top of the list for that many clicks. (Cora)

You can change the search engine that your address bar uses. (Sartack) The one that comes up is your default one and you can change it in your settings. (Finley)

Web Crawlers

James explained clearly how web crawlers (that are computer programs) search through all websites, checking out all pages. Enya added that these searches create index pages like in a book that are used by search engines.

We even had a go at carrying out our own indexing of common objects in the classroom! It was amazing to think how many website contain the same words to be indexed and just how many indexed words there may be, considering the massive increase of websites now.

Ranking

Out of the millions of websites that contain our key search terms, search engines can decide the order that they appear. This is called ranking. We had a go at trying to use criteria to rank our websites higher than others - a fun and competitive task! It is interesting that not all of the ranking reasons are made known to everyone by the search engines. The photos show the joy and frustration of the ranking exercise - tee hee!

How do search engines make money?

We considered how search engines make money as we realise that we do not pay a fee to carry out a search. These were some of the reasons that we found...