[Sigia-l] help for class on search engine

[M. Camilla Beltrami]

Hi,


I am preparing a class on Search Engines and as a part of it, I need to 
give the students some type of homework/exercise on the topic. The 
Professor I am teaching with wants to hand out a grid that should help them 
analyze search engines, but I think that a) the content of the grid is too 
old, b) it is too easy ... yes apparently I am very mean! :-)

The grid has questions like "Can you search in different languages" or 
"When you put in two or more keywords in the search box does it default to 
a boolean search?". To be a useful excercise the grid should be redone 
almost completely, but I am wondering if anybody has other, better and more 
interesting suggestions for a homework on search engines. Keep in mind that 
I have 200 students (undergraduate industrial design students) and that 
even if they are divided into groups I will still have looooooooots of 
homework to correct, which is why the idea is to keep this exercise small.


Thanks!
Camilla