Course Learning

Using the right keywords is really important when using search engines.

Choosing the right keywords will ensure the search engine's results are relevant.

When selecting keywords, think about the most relevant words.

For example, to find out how hot it is on the planet Mars, you might search for the words 'Mars', 'surface' and 'temperature'.

Sometimes you might want to search for exact matches to a word or phrase.

To do this, you can put the phrase inside quotation marks (" ").

For example, "The Three Little Pigs" would only return web pages where this phrase is used exactly.

If you add a minus symbol (-) before a word it will exclude pages that contain that word.

For example, 'Roman emperors - Caesar' will look for pages with 'Roman' and 'emperors' in it, but not 'Caesar'.

You can search within a website by starting the search with the word site followed by a colon ( and then the name of the website and keyword you want to search.

For example, entering 'site:bbc.co.uk computing' will only search www.bbc.co.uk for the keyword computing.

Once you have chosen a site, always be critical of what you read. Unlike most non-fiction books that you get from a library, many websites are not checked for accuracy.

If you have doubts about how reliable a piece of content is, you can check it by looking at other sites. If they all say the same thing it is probably accurate. This is called verification.

It is also important to think about who has published a website. Why has it been written and published?

Some websites might be biased or give only one side of an argument. These sites might present their opinion as fact.

You can also look at the domain name. Do you recognise the address as one that you can trust?

Addresses which end with .sch.uk, .ac.uk or .gov.uk are educational or government websites so are usually reliable.

Addresses which end with .co.uk, .com or .org can be bought and used by anyone but this doesn't mean that they are unreliable.

Some search engines also allow you to search using images.

You upload the image you are searching for and the search engine will return images it finds which either match it exactly or closely.

This is a great way to verify photographs of important events.