Investigating the Internet

A Year Six Exploration

Internet Searching

We have been further developing our understanding of searching the internet. At the end of our lesson, we came up with these useful tips to use when searching:

1. The search engine that you use can be changed in your settings. If you are in Bing and then find you are doing a Google search when you use the address bar, this is because this is set as your browser.
2. There are many search engines. Some like Swisscows are more family friendly. Some are more careful of your privacy.
3. Type in more than one key word. Searching for Boots might not get you to the shop that you need.
4. Searches in school have protection to stop you from seeing things that aren't suitable. Make sure that you have these settings at home. 
5. Report anything that comes up in a search that you don't feel comfortable about.

Investigating Web-crawlers

The children found out that search engines use web-crawlers or spiderbots to search the internet and create indexes. They created their own indexes (see right) and then understood the need for data centres which store all of the indexes! Information can be found if it is indexed; however, we now know that not everything on the internet is indexed. Can you work out why?

We all wrote our own summaries of learning and then created a class version:

"Web-crawlers search the internet to create indexes which are stored in data centres like Google's centre in Dublin. Indexes allow us to easily and rapidly find relevant information when we carry out a search enquiry." 

Investigating Ranking

Creating a school website plan helped us to understand how search engines rank the sites that we see. The picture below shows how ours would be ranked. Of course, adding a key word again and again no longer works! We found that great links to popular sites and our school name and important school key words were very important. 

What else affects ranking and search results?

It was interesting to look more closely at searches and find out that there were less obvious reasons for how a site is ranked and what we end up seeing. Have a look at the video to find out more...