Module 1

Module 1 Answers

Using Web Browsers

  1. Home page:
    1. Apple: www.apple.com.
    2. Apple always makes their home page the default home page for their default browser, Safari. To change the setting, you have to go into the browser (in this case, Safari) > Preferences > General > Homepage and change the URL listed there to the site of your choice.
  2. Yes. You can do it one of two ways. If you go into the "view" drop down menu in your browser, you can zoom in or out. You can do the same by hitting command and + to zoom in or command and - to zoom out or (depending on your trackpad settings if you're using a mac laptop) by pinching in or out on the track pad. The other way to change font face and size is to go into Safari > Preferences > Advanced > Accessibility and say "never use font sizes smaller than __" to make sure that the font on a webpage is always readable. You may want to alter the appearance of a webpage if it has poorly designed text layout or features unreadably small text so that the content on that page is still available to you.
  3. Safari's default search engine is Google. If you type your query right into the URL bar, it will take you to the google results for the terms you searched. It will also turn up google's search results if you type it into the spotlight search bar in the right hand corner of the iOS environment.

Searching The Web

  1. Google.com:
    1. About 222,000,000 results. I would estimate that about 75% of them actually relate to making a web page.
    2. About 8,220 results. I would estimate that nearly all of them actually relate to making a web page. Two examples from the list of results: A prezi on HTML and Our course site.
  2. No. Some have more (Bing, duckduckgo) while others had considerably fewer (yahoo.com). The difference probably comes from indexing power. Google and Bing are the big players in ths field and likely have way more resources devoted to "crawling" and accumulating webpages than smaller, less succesful sites like Yahoo. Google also owns a lot of the ad infrastructure and are affiliated with some of the biggest players on the web, which means more feed and access to their affiliates (even though they put up a front of "equal accessibility"). I might go to a search engine that's not my default if I don't find what I'm looking for on Google, if I'm not happy with the authority of the websites that turn up in the search results, or if I don't want to get "sponsored" sites that are trying to sell me something rather than that give me the information I need. I might also choose another search engine if I'm looking for one that responds better to search engine shortcuts ("", +, OR, -), though google is usually pretty responsive on that front.
  3. I would say that wolframalpha is more like a dictionary or online encyclopedia than a search engine. It's trying to "figure things out" or give them definition/solution. A search engine plays word association and pulls up things that might be what you're looking for -- not what the thing your'e looking for is.

Using Metasearch Sites

  1. Dogpile.
    1. A search site lists only results that that service's algorithms have indexed. A metasite lists top results from several search engines (or websites, in the case of metasites like Kayak.com and Expedia) at once, making it a more efficient way to find content.
    2. I'm uncertain how many search results there were (there's no indicator like there is on Google and Bing), but it turned up multiple pages of content. The matches were organized into several categories: web, images, video, news, shopping, and white pages. The web tab had two categories, Ad results and Web results. The matches seemed to be organized by relevance of the key word.
    3. I would say close to 80% relate to making a web page. Several pages into the results, they were still reflecting how to make a web page.
  2. Mama.
    1. On mama.com, there were many more pages of content than on dogpile. These were organized by web, news, images, videos and local.
    2. The results seemed to be filtered by relevance and by location, a feature the others didn't use (or at least not obviously). Businesses and/or sources that were geographically close to you appeared higher on the search list than others if you used the location feature. If you denied location information, they were filtered by relevance.

Finding Multimedia Elements

  1. Bing.
    1. Yes. Bing has an "images" and "video" tabs that will filter your search results based on multimedia file type.
    2. You can search for videos and images. You can also reverse search and put in an image to find other images like it or the source from which that image originated. To search for songs, you have to use the web feature, but on Bing and Google they usually come up as embeded youtube videos right in the serach options.
    3. Searched: Death of Bachelor panic at the disco. Results: 1,480,000.
    4. There are no warnings, but you can filter by source, price (if the song/video/content is for sale), date, length, and you can change the safesearch limits (light, moderate, heavy). There are no warnings about copyright infringement or permissions.

Web Hosting Sites

If I were to host my own site, I would probably use Wordpress.com (not .org) or GoDaddy. I've done pretty significant research on both for the last couple of months (I've used wordpress before and am thinking about starting a new blog/buying a domain name). The attraction to GoDaddy is the price, while the attraction to Wordpress is the interface. It's easy to manipulate once you get the hang of it, and knowing HTML/CSS will only help my ability to get the site to look the way I want. They also have excellent customer service and how-to guides related to coding, making your site searchable, and digital design best practices. The price is a little higher, but in my experience the sites produced with Wordpress are of better quality and are more reliable than ones I know that are run through GoDaddy. Granted, many of these are amateur blogs and it could be just an issue of faulty design, so I'm still amenable to new/different experience and information.

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