EDUC 6816 Information Literacy Quiz and Answers

How much do you know about information literacy? 

List 4 major search engines and a major directory. 
MJ:  Google, Yahoo, AOL, Netscape    Answer:  A few:   Google, Yahoo, Bing, AltaVista, Netscape,

What is a blog?  MJ:  A Website that allows the documentation of writing, posting links and multimedia projects, a social network, a platform to save and organize work   Answer:  A weblog, literally a log of the web.

Why might you use quotation marks when conducting a search? MJ:  I believe quotation marks are used to “refine” or search. Answer:  To ensure your keywords are appear in your search results in the order you have specified.

 URL is an acronym for… MJ:  Universal Resource Locator   Answer:  Uniform Resource Locator

 Identify three Boolean search terms.  MJ:  Boolean terms are used to help “define” your search   Answer:  And, Not, Or

 How do you find the owner or publisher of a Web site?   MJ:  Use the Whois website.  Answer: easywhois


 Identify these extensions and what they represent:

.org – business organization/ or non-profit   Answer: organization     .com – business organization   Answer: company

.sch –Schools   Answer:   school (used outside US)      .k12- Education system   Answer:  most US schools

.edu  - Educational sites    Answer:  US higher ed    .gov – government sites   Answer: US government

.ac – higher ed    Answer: higher ed outside of US       .net – networked organizations   Answer:  Network

.mil   - military   Answer: US military     .co- company   Answer:   Company if paired with country code

8. How do you find out who is linked to your school’s Web site?:  MJ:  Not sure   Answer:  Go to and do a link: command search.  In the search box type link:your school’s address

9. What clues in a Web address might indicate you are on a personal Web site?  MJ:  person’s name is in address, or ~   Answer:  person’s name, “user”, or tilde ~ , or percent sign

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)  MJ:  Use the country code and  the .edu extension?  Answer: Go to Google and type site:ac.za in the search box

11. How do you find the history of any given Web site?  MJ:  Wayback Machine  Answer:  Use the Wayback Machine. Go to www.archive.org and type the URL of the web site you would like to research into the search box.


12. How would you conduct a search for the following: US higher education Web sites that contain the word turtle? MJ:  Insert in search bar – key words – site, edu, turtle?  Answer:  Go to Google: and type “site:edu + turtle” in the search box.

13. How do sites get to the top of a result list in Google?  MJ:  By the number of times the sites have been viewed or searched by others.    Answer:  One factor Google uses to rank sites is popularity. It counts the number of links from sites all around the Web. For example, if a large number of sites has a specific keyword somewhere on their Web site along with a link to a particular site, Google counts the number of times the keyword appears along with the number of links to a particular site. The higher number of links to a site, the higher Google will rank that site on a list of results. There are several additional factors as well, including but not limited to the title of the site, the site’s meta information and the actual content of the site.