[Sigia-l] help for class on search engine

[Anders Ramsay]

Is the purpose of the course (or exercise) to help the students
understand how search engines work?

If so, you might want to consider not including search engines at all
in your exercise, but to instead place the students in the role of the
search engine - an entity asked to retrieve information based on a
query of usually only a few keywords, and in doing so needing to make
(often complex) choices about relevancy.  How does it make those
choices?  What makes one piece of information more relevant to a user
than another piece of information?  One possibility is to give the
students a couple kewords and then a product catalog or a long list of
books, and then ask them to put themselves in the role of the search
engine and list the first ten results that would be returned if they
were to enter those keywords in a search engine, stating in detail why
those books or products should be the top ten, and within the top ten,
why they should be ordered they way they were ordered.

If you do include search engines, I would recommend focusing on the
user interface, such as how well the user interface allows the user to
eliminate results that are not relevant to them.

 - Anders

On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 16:43:23 +0100, Eric Reiss <elr at e-reiss.com> wrote:
> Dear Camilla,
> 
> What do you want your students to learn from this exercise?
> 
> If you just want them to gain a little experience using a variety of
> engines, your grid may be fine. Although you can certainly make the
> exercise more difficult/demanding/time-consuming, will your students
> gain from this? I trust you're not going to be "mean" just for the
> sake of being mean or to prove you're smarter than the professor.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -----------------------
> eric reiss
> principal
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