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Following up from my slot at the ICT Co-ords….

From listening to Alan November last week, it made me reflect on my own use of internet search engines and also the way I taught it to students.

Students tend to only look at the first page of results when doing a web search, bearing this in mind it is very important to get your website to the top of a search engine. To get to the top of the results page in Google your website/page needs to be linked to from the most sites.

When viewing a website how do we now when the website was last updated, who owns it and when it was created? You could use a website like Easywhois, by typing in the url of the website it will reveal many details about the site.

To find out what websites link to the website you are viewing you could go to AltaVista and type link:website_url into the search box. A list of websites will then be shown that links to your chosen url. If you want to find out which of these websites are UK schools, following the web address in the search box type in URL:sch and press search.

To be able to find how a website has altered over time, you could go to The Wayback Machine and enter the websites url.

To illustrate all of this use the search “Martin Luther King” and select www.martinlutherking.org