Information on the web

Introduction

The World Wide Web is a vast information resource. This unit will provide you with the foundation skills to use search engines confidently to locate both information and images on the Web. You will also learn how to critically assess and reference the information you have found for study purposes.

1 Accessing online information

1.1 What this unit is about

In this unit you will be looking at information that can be found on the Web. You may already have explored the Web and discovered what an enormous amount of information it contains. Alternatively you may be a newcomer to the Web. Either way, this unit will help you to develop your skills in accessing online information.

Here are some things that I regularly use the Web for:

• Finding phone numbers
• Getting train times and booking tickets
• Getting information about theatre, cinema and concerts
• Checking the weather forecast
• Getting a map for new places I am about to visit
• Listening to radio programmes that I’ve missed
• Doing my weekly shopping
• Researching information, for example on a health topic, or looking for family history.

This list is not exhaustive; I use the Web for other things, and you may too.

2 How to do it

2.1 Introduction

In this section we will cover the following topics:

• browsing for information on the Web;
• searching for information on the Web;
• using search engines;
• bookmarking websites;
• finding images on the Web;
• how to reference sources.

Some of the material in this section has been drawn from Safari, an interactive website provided by the Open University Library. Safari covers finding and assessing information in much greater detail and using resources other than the Web; we do not cover these areas in this unit, but you may like to return to Safari in the future.

2 How to do it

2.2 Browsing for information on the Web

One way to find what you are looking for on the Web is to start from sites that you know are likely to have useful ‘links’ on them, like the main Open University pages or the Open University Library pages. These opening pages are known as home pages and are a bit like the contents page of a book. The home page usually gives you some information about the content of the website, often with links to other pages of information held on that site and on sites elsewhere. By clicking on a link – which might be a heading, underlined or different coloured words, images, or a drop-down menu – you are actually sending a request to the computer that holds that information, asking it to send it to your screen. Following the links that are presented to you on the screen is called ‘browsing’ – which you have been doing already.

You use what is on the screen to guide you to what you want.

Another quick way of accessing web pages is by using the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the page you want to look at. Type the URL (also sometimes called the web address) into the location/address box of your browser, press enter, and the website is presented on screen.

2.2.1 Making URLs work for you

Each page on the Web has a unique address, rather like a postcode or telephone number. ‘Locator’ is the important word in ‘Uniform Resource Locator’ since it can give you clues as to where you are within a website (for example, are you on the home page or are you further in?), what you are looking at, and the source of the information you are viewing (for example, whether it is from an academic institution or a company). Not only that, but if you understand how a URL is structured you can use the principles to deduce what a company or organisation’s web address might be.

All website names are part of the Domain Name System (DNS), and usually look something like this:

We can break down this long address and examine the individual parts to find out what we are looking at.

• http:// tells us that we are looking at a website – http stands for hypertext transfer protocol, the ‘protocol’ or set of rules used by the computer to access and deliver web pages.

• www.bbc tells us that we are looking at a website held on a computer (also called a ‘web server’) known as ‘www’ belonging to an organisation called ‘bbc’. A web server computer is often called ‘www’, but occasionally something more specific; for example, the T180 website is on a server called ‘students’.

• .co.uk tells us that we are looking at the website of a company (‘co’) in the UK. This part of the address is called the ‘domain’. Examples of other domains you may come across include .edu or .ac (educational or academic); .com (commercial); .gov (government); .org (non-governmental, non-profit making organisations). These might be followed by a country code, such as .uk, .au (for Australia), or .fr (for France) that can indicate the location of the computer holding the website.

Once you get past the home page of an organisation or institution an address might take the form:

We can break down the second part of the address:

The pathname refers to the folder in which the document or file is to be found. In this instance the document name is ‘eligible.htm’, and it is stored within a folder called ‘childbenefit’ on a computer belonging to an organisation called ‘inlandrevenue’ in the UK government domain. The pathname may have several parts to it if the file is in a ‘nested folder’, as shown below.

2.2.2 More on URLs

It is often possible to make an intelligent guess about a URL if you know the name of a company or organisation, but you may find some surprises. Some tips:

• domain names can’t contain spaces or punctuation, so try running words together
• UK companies are usually in the .co.uk domain, but may also use .com
• organisations may use .co or .com rather than .org
• companies and organisations often also own variants on their domain name and will automatically redirect you to the correct website.

2 How to do it

2.3 Searching for information on the Web

What do you do if you don’t know the URL of the website you are looking for, or haven’t been able to browse to it? The Web is not like a library – it isn’t carefully organised and catalogued, and it is growing all the time. Luckily, there are search sites that can help you find what you want.

2.3.1 Portals

Internet service providers (ISPs) usually provide their own portal and may configure your browser to use it as your home page. (Note that ‘home page’ here means the default page your browser displays when first started.)

2.3.2 Search sites

Other sites such as Google and Yahoo! concentrate on providing search facilities.

Yahoo! started out as a list of useful websites put together by two Stanford University students, but has grown somewhat since then. It still offers a web directory: a huge list of useful web pages collected by Yahoo! staff that you can browse. The directory is organised in the same way as a classified phone directory, but the difference is that categories can be browsed in successively greater detail.

Web directories can be a useful starting point if you are looking for information in a general area. If you are looking for more specific information or want to look more widely, a full-text search engine provides an alternative.

Search engines attempt to search all the text on all the pages of the Web. They use software spiders to seek out and index web pages, storing the results in huge databases. We will see how this is done later in this unit.

Search sites often provide both directories and full-text search, and will combine results to offer you the best of both worlds.

2.3.3 Search results

Let us look at the results returned by a search engine. I’ve chosen to use Google, but you may use another search engine; the layout is likely to be different in detail but most of the same elements will be present.

Each hit returned provides several pieces of information to help you decide whether to visit the page. This may include the title of the page, a short extract with search terms highlighted, and the domain (which will give you clues to the publisher of the page). For pages that also appear in the search site’s directory there may be a short description and a link to the category in which the page appears.

A search engine may return a huge number of hits, but surprisingly often the information you wanted can be found by following one of the first few links. This is because the results are ranked to offer you the ‘best’ first.

2 How to do it

2.4 Using search engines

Search engines can be very good at finding information since they cover such a huge number of web pages. Unfortunately it can be difficult to find the one you want in the huge number of hits that they return. I can illustrate some of the problems, and some of the strategies you can use to overcome them, with an example.

Let’s assume a friend of yours, Jill, has heard you talking about ‘Living with the Net’ and is trying to find out more about the course. What problems might Jill face when using a search engine to do this?

Jill’s first impulse might be to visit a search engine such as Google and type ‘living with the net’ in the search box. How many hits might Jill expect? How likely is she to find the page she needs?

One strategy is to search for a phrase. In this case Jill is expecting to find pages with the complete phrase ‘Living with the Net’, so she can search for that.

Another strategy is to think of other words that are likely to appear on a page you are looking for, rather than what the page is about.

Searching for a more unusual word or words is likely to return many fewer hits. For example, if Jill remembered the course code, T180, she could search for that.

A search that combined some of these strategies would probably lead to good results, but you might need to turn to the advanced search features of the search engine.

2.4.1 Advanced search

Search engines usually offer an advanced search page where you can construct more complex queries.

The search I used in this particular example is perhaps unusual since we’ve been looking for a very specific piece of information. More often we search for less specific information and are content to accept results from any source.

2.4.2 Other search engines

It is a good idea to try several search engines, and then stick with the one you like best. You should consider how useful the results tend to be when picking your favourite, as well as ease of use and additional features such as spell checking.

Remember that many websites provide their own search engine, and the restricted scope may help you find information more easily. You can use the same search techniques we discussed previously.

2 How to do it

2.5 Bookmarking websites

Most browsers allow you to keep a record of links to websites that you have found useful. These are called ‘Bookmarks’ in Firefox and ‘Favorites’ in Internet Explorer, and may have other names, such as a ‘Hot List’, in other browsers. For convenience I’ve chosen to call them bookmarks. Browsers usually offer the facility for organising the bookmarks into folders and sub-folders so that you can keep track of them as your collection grows.

You may well have a collection of bookmarks already. If not, try the activity below to collect some.

2.5.1 Organising bookmarks

As you collect bookmarks in your trips around the Web you are likely to find that the list gets very long. Sometimes you may not be able to remember what a particular bookmark refers to, because its title isn’t sufficiently informative. To make the use of bookmarks easier, most browsers offer some facilities for organising them. The commands you need will probably be on a Bookmarks or Favorites menu.

You can create folders to group your bookmarks, creating a hierarchy of folders within folders if necessary, just like the filing system on your hard disk. If the name of the bookmark is not clear, you can change it to something more informative.

2.5.2 History

What do you do when you realise that you forgot to bookmark that really useful page and now can’t remember its URL?

You may be able to find it again using the ‘History’ feature of your browser. This will list all the sites and pages you’ve visited recently and you may be able to retrace your steps using it.

2 How to do it

2.6 Finding images on the Web

As with websites, one of the easiest ways of searching for images is to use a search engine such as Google. You will see that above the Google search box are some words that allow you to select what you are searching for: web, images, groups, news, and more.

You will notice that each result is shown as a thumbnail with some additional information below it. For example, one of the images I found was babygorilla1.jpg

To get this image I followed the link from Google to a page provided by the African Wildlife Foundation which offered a selection of images for download for use as wallpaper or a screen saver. I chose a link to the image of the baby gorilla.

2.6.1 Thumbnail

This thumbnail gives you an idea what the image looks like, but remember that the full image may be much larger and more detailed.

Here’s an explanation of the text underneath the image.

1. Filename babygorilla1.jpg

2. Images used on the Web are most commonly stored in GIF and JPEG (pronounced jay-peg) formats; they can be recognised by file extensions .gif and .jpg or .jpeg. These formats are widely supported by browsers and they are compressed so that images are relatively quick to download.

3. Picture size 800 × 600 pixels

4. Each picture is made up of dots called pixels.
5. This picture is quite large (800 dots across by 600 down). This would fill the screen on a small monitor, though you may have a monitor with a larger screen area.

1. File size 52k

2. The file size is given in kilobytes. The file size determines how long it will take to download the image from the Web: the larger the file size the longer the download time. It also shows how much storage space is required; this may be especially important if your website or mailbox space is limited by your ISP.

3. URL
   http://www.awf.org/images/wallpaper/babygorilla1.jpg

4. This is the URL of the original image. You will need to make a note of this URL so that you can reference the image if you use it. You will learn about referencing later in this unit.
5. To visit the page where the original image was found, click on the thumbnail.

2.6.2 Saving an image from a web page

Once you have located a page containing an image that you want, you can save it on your hard disk by right-clicking on the image and choosing ‘Save Picture As…’ (Internet Explorer) or ‘Save Image As…’ (Firefox).

2.6.3 A note on copyright and plagiarism

You must remember that images and other material found on the Web are subject to copyright.

One of the reasons the World Wide Web has grown so quickly, and why it is so interesting, is that anyone can publish (almost) anything on it. This raises a number of problems, however, particularly with the issue of copyright. It is very easy to find information, images, audio and video files on the Web. You can then easily save them and incorporate them into your own material. This ease of copying means people often make the mistake of assuming that everything on the Web is freely available. This is not the case.

Here are some general rules of thumb you should bear in mind:

• Just because something is on the Web does not mean it is freely available for you to use in your own work. As with any material which is protected by copyright, you should seek the author’s permission if you wish to use it.
• With text you can use up to 5 per cent of any one piece of work without seeking permission. With images, sound, animations, and video clips, you should seek permission, unless you are specifically told you can download and use them freely.
• Bear in mind that information published on the Web may have been put there by someone who does not hold the copyright to it. Simply because material appears on the Web does not mean that it is in the public domain, or that it has been published legitimately.
• If you wish to reuse a lot of material taken from the Web, you should make a link to the page where it appears, rather than incorporating it into a page of your own. When you provide links you should place them in an appropriate context, and identify the site to which they connect.
• Copyright law allows students special concessions, but these are very limited. As a student you may use copyright material for your own personal study purposes only. This includes using copyright material submitted as part of an assignment for assessment. If you later want to use the same material for any other purpose you must seek permission.
• You should never alter images or other copyright material (except that illustrations may be resized, and editorial deletions can be made to texts so long as these are clearly indicated).

Attempting to pass off someone else’s work as your own is plagiarism.

You should always acknowledge the source of any ‘third party’ material you include in your own work. Failure to do so will be interpreted as a deliberate attempt at plagiarism. The OU takes plagiarism very seriously.

Any use of someone else’s material must be acknowledged, and the following section will show you how to do that.

2 How to do it

2.7 How to reference sources

You have seen how easy it is to find what what you want on the Web. When you quote any information or use any images that you have not written or created yourself it is important to ensure that you reference the source of the quote or image. This is to show that you are not trying to pass off someone else’s work as your own, and to enable your reader, should they wish, to access the source of that quote.

2.7.1 How to cite sources of information

The reader may want to to access the source of the quote to see the its context or to explore further the ideas contained in the quote. The reference should provide all the information that the reader needs to find the source.

In this unit we are going to show you the Harvard system, a common method of referencing quotes. There are other ways to reference that are equally acceptable and you may already be aware of these or come across them in the future.

A reference has two parts: the first immediately follows the quotation and the second part is in a bibliography at the end of the article or essay. The reference in the text is a short form that doesn’t clutter up the main text, and the bibliography provides the full source details.

2.7.2 First part of a reference – following the quote or image

This part of the reference consists of just the author’s name and the year of publication. These are placed in brackets after the quotation e.g. (Bennett, 2004).

For some material, especially images and web pages, it isn’t possible to identify the author or publication date. In these cases you may be able to attribute an organisation or publisher, either by name or by using a URL. For online material, give the date you accessed it; for example (www.awf.org, 16 March 2004).

If you find you have used more than one work by the same author, add a letter to distinguish them; for example (Bennett, 2004a; Bennett, 2004b). For web resources, give more of the URL.

2.7.3 Second part of a reference – the bibliography

The bibliography contains full details of the source. The entries are listed in alphabetical order of author.

There are several types of source that you may be referencing so I have given an example for each.

A book

You should include:

• Author’s (or editor’s) last name and initials;
• year of publication (in brackets);
• title (in italics);
• place of publication;
• publisher.

A web page

You should include:

• Author’s last name and initials (or name or URL of publishing site);
• title;
• ‘online’ in square brackets;
• ‘available from’ information such as the URL;
• the date you accessed the site in square brackets.

An image from a web page

You should include:

The title of the image, or a description;

URL;

in square brackets, the date you accessed the site.

An image from a clip art collection

You should include:

Author (if given);

title (in italics);

form, e.g. Clipart Collection CD (in square brackets);

date (if given);

availability, e.g. distributor, address.

A conference or email message

You should include:

Author’s email address;

full date of message;

subject of message (in italics);

‘email to’ or ‘conference message to’ followed by the recipient’s name, or conference name.

2 How to do it

2.8 Reference sourcing quiz

1 When referencing an image what details should be included alongside the image?

• A The URL of the image
• B The file name of the image
• C The image URL and the date you accessed the site
• D The file name of the image and the date you accessed the site

Now read the answer

2 When referencing an image what details should be included in the bibliography?

• A The URL of the image
• B The file name of the image
• C The image title, [online image], the image URL and the date you accessed the site
• D The file name of the image and the date you accessed the site

Now read the answer

3 Here is a message in a discussion group called misc.education.adult. It was written by Hazel Blears on 12 March 2003. What information should follow this quote? ‘Hi. I am currently studying for an HND in Administration and Information Management and would like to know if anyone can recommend a course that would be beneficial to me.’

• A (Blears, 2003)
• B (Blears, 12 March 2003)
• C (Hazel_Blears@hotmail.com. Conference message to misc.education.adult)

Now read the answer

4 For the example given in Question 3, what information should be included in the bibliography?

• A Blears, H. (2003)
• B Blears, H. (12 March 2003)
• C Blears, H. (Hazel_Blears@hotmail.com), 12 March 2003. Conference message to misc.education.adult

Now read the answer