How a Web Search Works KS2 Unplugged activity

Simple lesson to explain how a web search works. When you lose something at home who do you ask? Most pupils ask their mum. They use her stored knowledge of the house to help them find things. In this activity pupils start from this premise to create a class index of objects and their locations. They become human search spiders, modelling the spider search programs that index the web. Finally they ask the question which location s best coming up with lots of criteria such as most objects or location, newness etc mirroring the hundreds of questions asked by a web search program algorithm before it delivers it's result.

Pupils create a simple list of items in their class before ranking these and using them to help others find things.

Link to code-it.co.uk network/internet/search resources