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 this learning:

Searches can be started in the address bar or the search bar. Be careful! The address bar may use a different search engine.

You can set a default search engine so that you always use the one that you intend to. Some of us have changed ours and are trying ones like Duckduckgo which focus on privacy. This means that the address bar searches will always use the search engine that we have chosen. 

You can choose a search engine that is more family friendly like Swisscows which also focuses on privacy. 

If you put a phrase in " ", then it will search for exactly that phrase. Add words to your search to show what you are looking for in more detail. For example, don't just add 'Rugby', add 'Rugby tourist information', otherwise you will see more about sports than the town!

Search with care and permission. Always talk to a teacher or parent if a search shows something that makes us feel uncomfortable or confused. 

We then examined how web crawlers search the internet to create indexes to make search engines quicker. 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!