Wednesday, January 21st
Our January meeting will feature the club's annual Photo Contest, and Board Elections.
If you'd like to enter the contest, simply come to the meeting with a photo of a reptile or amphibian that YOU have taken. You can enter as many as you'd like. Winners will receive a year's membership.
Meetings start promptly at 8pm in the Alumni Room of Medaille College.
The Fine Art of Searching
In this modern day world of the World Wide Web finding information about your favorite reptile or amphibian can be both easier and harder at the same time. No longer do we have to drag ourselves to the library or try to track down experts when we can simply go on-line to find all sorts of information and all sorts of topics. The problem with information on the web is that it is very easy to fall victim to information overload.
When doing research on the web the best way to battle information overload is to try and verify the information you find on the web in two other places. Remember that in this day and age almost anyone can publish a web page and say anything they want. There is plenty of good information but there is also plenty of misinformation as well.
Whether you are searching for information on a new pet you are considering or just trying to find more information on an existing pet, search engines are usually your first stop. There are many different search engines out there, but all search engines fall into two categories: directories and actual search engines. Directories are sites like Yahoo. With directories a real live human being looks at each site that is listed in the directory and evaluates it for content. Actual search engines like Alta Vista or Google don't have a person looking over the content of each site but rather send little programs out to look at each site that is listed with them to see what content is on each site. The difference between these two types is that directories tend to have a bit more accurate information about the content since a person actually checks it while actual search engines tend to have more listings but may not have the most accurate information about the content of the site.
Now that we know a bit about how search engines work, lets talk about how to effectively search them. Most search engines take the same kind of commands so the example I give here should be useful for whatever search engine you prefer. The most basic way to search is to just type in the topic you need information. For example, if you type in bearded dragon into a search engine you will find some information about bearded dragons, but you may also find information about water dragons and komodo dragons mixed in to the list.
To avoid this we can do a couple of different things. The first thing we could do is to enclose the phrase in quotes. By typing in "bearded dragon" you search for that exact phrase rather than just web pages that include the words bearded and dragon somewhere on the same page (and not necessarily together).
The other thing we can do to eliminate komodo dragon from popping up on your list of sites for bearded dragons is to use the minus sign. By typing in bearded dragon -komodo into the search line you are telling the search engine to look for any page containing the words bearded and dragon but NOT the word komodo. The minus sign tells the search engine to exclude any sites that contain the word komodo.
The converse of this is the plus sign. By typing +bearded dragon into a search engine you are telling the search engine that the word bearded HAS to appear in the content of the web sites that appear in the search list. The plus sign tells the search engine that it must include the word.
You can create even more sophisticated searches with the use of Boolean operators like AND and OR. For example if you typed in bearded AND dragon into a search engine, only sites that contain both the words bearded and dragon. On the other hand if you typed in bearded OR dragon you would get a list of sites that contain the word bearded or the word dragon, but not necessarily both words together on the same site.
The final lesson in searching is the use of the parentheses to narrow your search. You can use the parentheses to group together different queries. For example, let's say you want to look for information about breeding bearded dragons but do not want any reference to komodo dragons. You could type (bearded dragon -komodo) AND breeding into a search line. The search engine will first search for any web sites that contain the words bearded and dragon but not komodo. It would then look through that list of pages for the word breeding and only display those pages.
Hopefully these searching tips will help you the next time you are out in cyberspace looking for information on you favorite reptile or anything else.
Help reptiles in need by donating to our Adoption Fund! Your donations will help feed and house reptiles waiting for adoption.