Information Literacy Quiz & Response

Here are the questions and my answers to the information literacy quiz from the following link: Information Literacy Quiz The correct answers to the quiz can be found through this link as well.

1. List 4 major search engines and a major directory.
            Ipl2                              Infomine                       Yahoo
            Google Scholar            About.com      

2. What is a blog?
            A blog is a type of website usually created by an individual to share posts, or information, on a topic they choose. Readers can leave comments and interact with the blog creator.

3. Why might you use quotation marks when conducting a search?
            If you are looking for a phrase or a person’s full name, quotation marks in a search causes the search to only look for those words when they are together in that phrase.

4. URL is an acronym for…
            Uniform Resource Locator

5. Identify three Boolean search terms.
            and, or, not

6. How do you find the owner or publisher of a Web site?
            The owner or publisher is usually named in the beginning portion of the URL.

7. Identify these extensions and what they represent:
.org  non-profit organization
claa -  
.com – commercial or business
.sch    
.k12 – elementary or secondary schools and school corporations
.edu - educational sites, but this can include personal faculty and staff.    .
gov - government sites
.ac   - United Kingdom academic institutions
 .net – network or Internet service providers
.mil - government sites 
 .co - Columbia, or online branding needs

8. How do you find out who is linked to your school’s Web site?
            Go into google. Type: “link:” and then the url of the school’s site in the search

9. What clues in a Web address might indicate you are on a personal Web site?
            Read the URL carefully. Look for a personal name (e.g., jbarker or barker) following a tilde ( ~ ), a percent sign ( % ), or or the words "users," "members," or "people."

10. How would you conduct a search for the following: a list of Web sites of all the academic institutions in South Africa? (Hint: South Africa’s country code is .za)
Google - Academic institutions link:. *.za

11. How do you find the history of any given Web site?
            Navigate to web.archive.org. Go to the Wayback Machine. Enter in the website you would like to     view the history of and it will show you the history of the website.

12. How would you conduct a search for the following: US higher education Web sites that contain the word turtle?
            Google: turtle site:*.edu

13. How do sites get to the top of a result list in Google?
            The Google Web Directory starts with a collection of websites selected by Open Directory volunteer editors. Google then applies its patented PageRank technology and other factors to rank the sites based on their importance. Horizontal bars, which are displayed next to each web page, indicate Google’s view of the importance of the page. This distinctive approach to ranking web sites enables the highest quality pages to appear first as top results for any Google directory category.


Response to Quiz
    When I was taking this quiz, I realized that no matter how I did on the final quiz, I am no better than somewhat savvy when it comes to information literacy. There were only a few questions I knew right away without researching or using the knowledge I gained from reading articles on information literacy for this course.
   This quiz reminded me of the importance of checking websites you are searching, like checking for the owner or publisher, the history of the site, etc. I was not aware that you could see a site's history through the Wayback Machine. I used this tool to view my school website's history. It was neat to see what the website looked like in 2001 when it was first started.
    I had also not considered using extensions to help define a search. While I was aware of different extensions and their purposes, I did not connect how this could be useful for narrowing a search. Nor had I considered checking to see who was linked to a site I was viewing or using as a source of information.
    I did find it interesting that the quiz focused on searching with the Altavista search engine while I, and many other students, focus on the Google search engine and tools. I recently took a course on Google and how it has grown exponentially in the past ten years. I wondered when this quiz was created and if there was a reason it centered around Altavista. Did the creators of the quiz disagree with the way Google lists their results based on the number of links to a site? I would be interested in finding more information about this topic.