31 augustus 2006
Learning from students
Before the academic year commences I had the honour to play the role of guinea pig as teacher. 24 Brand new MSc students had freshly arrived from all over the world in Wageningen and took part in my class of Information Literacy. We run this course using Blackboard. Allright no problem whatsoever you might think. However newly arrived students nearly always means no access to the computers yet, not signed in to the Blackboard modules yet. And on top of that the student PC's were all upgraded over the summer holidays, which meant that the first users had to log in about 5 times to install or update additional software, and Windows insisted on restarting the computer. It was fun, as you can imagine.
On the good side though, I gained a new insight from one of these students as well. I often teach about the title search command in websearch engines, or about searching for filtetype:pdf as well. However until today I had not realized myself what actually happened when you combine these commands.
Normally when you search for [intitle:tomatoes] Google limits this search to the word appearing in the title tag. That what appeares between title and /title (between <>)in your html code of the webpage. The result is the text string appearing at the top of your browser window. With PDf’s however, this works completely different. In PDF’s the title tag doesn’t exist and I did not realize this until today. When you combine title searches with searches for PDF files actually search for the title in the document, eg [intitle:tomatoes ext:pdf]. Since the title tag doesn’t exist for PDF files you retrieve documents with the search term in the actual title of the document. Perhaps simple, but I had not realized this until today.
Despite the problems, the course was worth it.
Technorati tags: Operators; Search Engines
On the good side though, I gained a new insight from one of these students as well. I often teach about the title search command in websearch engines, or about searching for filtetype:pdf as well. However until today I had not realized myself what actually happened when you combine these commands.
Normally when you search for [intitle:tomatoes] Google limits this search to the word appearing in the title tag. That what appeares between title and /title (between <>)in your html code of the webpage. The result is the text string appearing at the top of your browser window. With PDf’s however, this works completely different. In PDF’s the title tag doesn’t exist and I did not realize this until today. When you combine title searches with searches for PDF files actually search for the title in the document, eg [intitle:tomatoes ext:pdf]. Since the title tag doesn’t exist for PDF files you retrieve documents with the search term in the actual title of the document. Perhaps simple, but I had not realized this until today.
Despite the problems, the course was worth it.
Technorati tags: Operators; Search Engines
