Lesson 5:

Tightening the
web
Year 8 – Developing for the web
 Starter activity

Categorising animals
Animals are grouped into different classes based on the ways in which
they are
the same. Identify as many differences between the groups as you can.

Fish Mammals Amphibians

Birds Reptiles Arthropods

 Starter activity

Specific groups
If you asked: “Which animals have feathers?”

The answer would be:

Birds
 Starter activity

Overlapping groups
If you asked: “Which animals can live in water?”

The answer would be:

 Starter activity

Overlapping groups
If you asked: “Which animals can live in water?”

The answer would be:

Foxes can’t live in

water so why are
mammals here?

Fish Amphibians Mammals

 Objectives

Lesson 5: Tightening the web

In this lesson, you will:
● Use search technologies effectively
● Discuss how the choice of search terms affects the information you
find
● Create hyperlinks to allow users to navigate between multiple web
pages

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 Starter activity

Narrowing results
If you want fewer answers, you can include more details to narrow your
search.

How can you add to this question to have amphibians and mammals as
the answer?

“Which animals can live in water ………… can live on land?”

 Starter activity

Narrowing results
“Which animals can live in water AND can live on land?”

The answer would be:

Amphibians Mammals
 Starter activity

Combining groups
Sometimes you may want a broader range of answers, so you would
specify two separate parts to the question.

What word could you add to a question to have both mammals and
arthropods as the answer?

“Which animals drink milk as babies ………… have more than four
legs?”
 Starter activity

Combining groups
“Which animals drink milk as babies OR have more than four legs?”

The answer would be:

Mammals Arthropods
 Starter activity

Excluding groups
You can ask questions that eliminate groups that you don’t want as part
of
the answer.

What word could you add to a question to only get arthropods as the
answer?

“Which animals do ………… have fewer than 5 legs?”

 Starter activity

Excluding groups
“Which animals do NOT have fewer than 5 legs?”

The answer would be:

Arthropods
 Starter activity

Combining parameters
You can also join terms in a question to get a more focused answer.

If you asked: “Which animals have wings AND are NOT cold-blooded?”

The answer would be:

 Starter activity

Combining parameters
If you asked: “Which animals have wings AND are NOT warm-blooded?”

The answer would be:

Arthropods
 Activity 1

Search engine index

Remember that crawlers catalogue a huge number of web pages each
day.

There could be billions of web pages that match each possible keyword
that could be searched.

In the same way that you narrowed down the results of animal
searches, you can narrow the number of results found by search
engines.

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 Activity 1

Default searches
The default of a search engine is to return results using the AND
operator.

This requires all keywords to be present on any place on the web page
returned as part of the search.

This search engine has found 58.6 million results for Edinburgh AND
castle.
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 Activity 1

Controlling searches
Search engines provide operators to help control a search more
carefully:

OR operator NOT operator Phrase search

Finds pages with Finds pages with Pages found that
either Edinburgh or Edinburgh, but only have
castle on them. removes those with “Edinburgh castle”
word castle. on them, in that 1
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 Activity 1

Controlling a search
You are going to investigate the impact these operators have on the
number of results returned by a search engine.

1. Open the ‘Improving searches’ worksheet.

2. Use a search engine to find the information outlined in the table.

Once you have all finished, we will compare the number of results you
got and see who has used search terms and operators to the best
effect.

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 Activity 2

Many web pages

So far we have only considered single, standalone web pages.

We know from experience that many web pages are connected together
to form websites.

We browse between pages of a site using hyperlinks.

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 Activity 2

Hyperlinks in HTML
Web pages are modified using a tag that marks text or images as
‘clickable’ to link through to a different page.

<a href="RPi4.htm">
<img src="TopView.jpg">
</a>
Text “Find out more” on
page hyperlinked to HTML Image file “TopView.jpg”
file RPi4.htm. hyperlinked to HTML file
RPi4.htm.
Note that the target HTML
file needs to be in the
same folder as the
starting page as you saw
in lesson 2.
<a href="RPi4.htm">Find out more</a> 2
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 Activity 2

Building a high quality web site

Using your web page from last lesson, you need to create a second
page called ‘improving_searching.html’ that you can link to from the
first.

Your new page needs to summarise how to use different search

parameters effectively, specifically:
● How OR works
● How NOT works (the - symbol)
● How phrase searches work (using “” marks)

You should also create a link on both pages to take you to the other:
<a href="search.htm">Advanced search operators</a>
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 Plenary

Plenary
Let’s see if you can remember the impact of different search operators
on the number of search engine results.

The first search:

Suez canal
Number of results: 21,800,000

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 Plenary

Plenary
Will the number of results for the next search be higher or lower?

Suez canal
Number of results: 21,800,000

Suez OR canal
Number of results: ? 2
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 Plenary

Plenary
Higher! What about the next search?

Suez OR canal
Number of results: 1,060,000,000

“Suez canal”
Number of results: ? 2
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 Plenary

Plenary
Lower! What about the next search?

“Suez canal”
Number of results: 6,100,000

suez OR canal -
canal
Number of results: ? 2
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 Plenary

Plenary
Higher! Can you explain why?

suez OR canal -
canal
Number of results: 41,300,000

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 Summary

Next lesson

In this lesson, you... Next lesson, you will...

Considered how to narrow down Explore the impact of web

search results and created technologies on the ways in
websites of hyperlinked web which we live and work
pages

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