Web Search Project Assignment

1. Find Information on a Research Topic
   
   Choose a research topic - a topic for study - anything in which you have a serious interest. Search for information about your topic on the World Wide Web, using one or more search engines. There are a great many search engines! For example, you can click here to see a nice list that Yahoo maintains.
   
   You must report on at least three different web sites (pages) that provide good information on your topic.
   
   As part of your report, you will need to include the URL's of the sites. Therefore you should keep track of promising URL's as you do your searching. Most browsers allow the user to save URL's as "bookmarks" or "favorites." You can also just paste URL's into a word-processor document and save them as a file.
   
   If you begin to search with a search engine, but get too few or too many results, you can broaden or narrow your search by dropping or adding keywords or conditions.
   
   
2. Find Out How To E-mail The President
   
   Use a search engine and keywords having to do with e-mail and the President to generate a list of matching web sites. Look through some of those sites and/or sites they link to.
   
   Note: It is quite possible that much (or even most) of the sites the search engine will find for you will be bogus (fake). There may be vulgar (or worse) content in some of the web pages listed by search engines. My advice: for this search, click only on links that are in the .gov domain, and don't actually send e-mail to an address until after you have verified that it is authentic.
   
   Use good judgement. The goal is to keep searching until you discover the proper way to send e-mail to the President. Keep a record of which sites you visited during your search.
   
   
3. Find Out How To E-mail A U.S. Senator
   
   Working much as you did to find the President's e-mail address, use a search engine and keywords having to do with e-mail and the United States Senate to find out how to send e-mail to one of California's two United States Senators.
   
   
4. Make A Report
   
   Use Microsoft Word or another word processor to put together a nicely-formatted report that includes the following information:
   
   
   1. the research on your topic:
      1. The topic you chose,
      2. A brief description of the information you found on your topic, including the URL's for three or more web pages that have good information. (Query URL's are not acceptable - it is not enough to just enter some keywords into a search engine and report the URL of the search. I'll demonstrate in class what I mean by this.),
      3. A brief description of how you found the information. State which search engine(s) and keywords you used. Were the interesting results near the top of the list returned by the search engine(s)? How far down were they? How many links did you have to examine before you were sure you had something acceptable?
      
      
   2. how to e-mail the president:
      1. The e-mail address someone should use to send e-mail to the President of the United States,
      2. A brief description of how you found this information, including which search engine(s) and keywords you used, the URL's of the web pages you examined, and the URL's of the web pages where you found the information you were seeking.
      
      
   3. how to e-mail a senator:
      1. The proper e-mail address or the URL of the proper "e-mail form" for one of California's two United States Senators, and
      2. A brief description of how you found this information, including which search engine(s) and keywords you used, the URL's of the web pages you examined, and the URL's of the web pages where you found the information you were seeking.
   
   Use formatting options such as titles, boldface, indenting, and so forth to create an attractive and readable report. Your report must have a header and a footer (these must appear on all pages). The header must contain your name, class identifier (CS 4000), the words "Web Search Project", and the due date. The footer must contain the page numbers. Space the header and footer according to the specifications given in the directions for magazine article reviews.