Research the Net

Beate Hundsdörfer

Lecture and Exercises

Module 1: Friday, June 14th 2002

Abstract

finding content in the Net
placing content in the Net

The main subjects of the lecture and exercises will be:

facts and hints to develop your own way of efficient information retrieval
strategies to place content in the internet

Course Outline

Morning Session

Lecture from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., including a 20 minutes break

For an efficient information retrieval as well as for a successful placement of content in the internet it is necessary to be familiar with the structure, the different forms of navigation and the behaviour of internet users.
Ironically, many people feel that staying current with the world of search is a major source of information overload. There's a lot going on in the world of web search, that makes it difficult to stay up to date. Nevertheless it is worth having a look at it, because there is a lot to discover beyond google.
In order to give useful hints to develop your own way of efficient information retrieval and search engine optimisation the main issues of the lecture will be:

The structure of the internet
The different forms of navigation and their limits
- search engines, meta search engines and directories
  - how to find the right one
  - basic and special search tools
  - cooperations
  - zombies and newcomers
  - specials (people, media archives, libraries, news, newgroups)
- commercial database hosts
How search engines work
- business strategies of search engine and catalogue providers
- 3 different ways of search
- how search engines collect and structure the information
- ranking methods
- spamming
- future trends
How to optimize a website for search engines
- webdesign according to the demand of search engines
- meta-tags (title, keywords, description, robots.txt)
- (paid) registration

Afternoon Session

During the afternoon you will prove the above mentioned information either by doing a search for special information or by making a concept to place certain content in the net. These excercises will be done in groups.

Media

Software

Microsoft Internet Explorer, MS Office (Word, Excel)