Sources of Information (Edexcel IGCSE ICT)

Revision Note

Author

Expertise

Computer Science Content Creator

Primary sources (your own)	Secondary sources
Sound recordings	Newspapers
Photographs	Books
Interviews/questionnaires	Television & radio broadcasts
Social media posts	Websites
Emails	CDs, DVDs or Blu-rays

To select the most appropriate source of information, you must consider:
- It's fitness for purpose
- It's fitness for the intended audience

Search engines are tools that locate and display web pages related to the search terms entered by the user
They are essential for navigating the vast amount of information on the internet
They index millions of web pages and use algorithms to rank the relevance of each page to the search terms

Search engines work in three stages:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Ranking

Crawling is when web crawlers scour the internet daily to retrieve new websites
Indexing is how websites are categorised based on the content of their web pages, keywords and metadata
Ranking is how websites are ranked and listed on search engine pages - this depends on many factors to display the most relevant results

Feature	Description
Keywords	Used to identify relevant information
Search types	Ways to refine your search, such as searching for: images news location
Search tools	Filters and sorting options to narrow down searches
Suggested sites & autofill	Automatic suggestions that appear as you type to help users find things faster
Search syntax	Rules that dictate how words and phrases are used in a search, e.g. AND (+) only results that match both words NOT (-) before a word will return results that do not include that word Matching ("") only displays results that include whole phrase

Describe two ways that a user can make effective use of a search engine to select information.

[4]

Answer

Two linked descriptions from:

1. Use key words/terms (images/video/websites) [1] to return more relevant results [1]
2. Filter by images/video/websites [1] to return appropriate file type [1]
3. Filter date [1] to return more recent results [1]
4. Use search syntax (+ - “”) [1] to ensure results include/exclude key terms [1]
5. Filter by usage rights [1] to comply with copyright [1]
6. Filter by colour/size [1] to return results that are more fit for purpose [1]
7. Compare results [1] to look for accuracy / reliability / bias of results [1]
8. Use different search engines [1] as they use different processes/algorithms [1]

to absolutely everything:

the (exam) results speak for themselves:

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