Assignment 7 is due Friday, April 24, 2009 at 9:00 pm.

Look at the slides for Chapter 5: Searching the WWW and
Chapter 9: Forms

  1. Create a "guestbook" that you can access from your main page (index.html) by selecting the link for Assignment 7. To implement the guestbook, create a form that will send you e-mail containing comments from users about your Web page (or your Web project, in case you decide to use this guestbook as part of your project...). The page should use form elements to ask the user for information like (but not limited to):

    On your Web page for assignment 7, use the following form elements:

    In the ACTION attribute of the form tag, use cgiemail as described in class. Suggestion: try to get the form working using a mailto url as the value of the form action attribute first.
    Check out the form examples.

    The guestbook should also contain a Web page where your users can view what others have written. Provide a link on your form Web page to a comments Web page. Post some comments on this page as if they had been sent to you (you can make them as flattering as you like). With this type of guestbook, the owner of the book needs to manually post the comments received from the form email; there are other types that will automatically update your Web page using the info gathered using the form (which can be a good thing or a bad thing, of course, depending on the comments...) but that is beyond the scope of our course. Here is an example using HTML of a guest book with a comments page.

    For the 2 Web pages you create for this assignment, be sure to use good coding (pages should validate for strict xhtml), include a heading and title that indicate this is Assignment 7 for CS403 and your section number as well as your first and last name (do not forget to include the date/time stamp on the pages, the clickable xhtml validator logo, and the clickable CSS validator logo).

  2. Do the following and report your findings in an email that you send to Dan (der29@cisunix.unh.edu).

    1. Go "ego-surfing" - Search for your name using two different White Pages and two search engines. Describe your results for each by identifying which tools you used and how many hits were returned. Did you discover any surprises??
    2. Examine three search engines by reading their help information. (Do not include metasearch engines in this exercise.) Include the following information for each search engine:
      • The name of the search engine and its url.
      • A summary of how to pose an effective search. In other words, the rules for submitting a search query.
      • The actual syntax you used to find information about your favorite musician/band OR about your favorite sports team/athlete.
      • The number of hits that are returned for each of the three search engines using the query syntax that you specified for each.
    3. Why do you suppose that submitting the exact same query to different search engines yields a different list of matches?
    4. Based on the information you collected in part b, which search engine do you prefer? Why?
    5. Now select a metasearch engine and use it to search for information about your favorite musician/band OR about your favorite sports team/athlete (use whatever you searched for information about above). How many hits were returned? Do you feel the metasearch engine was more effective than any of the three search engines you used above?
    6. How is the metasearch engine different from a regular search engine in terms of how it works?
© McGraw-Hill 2008. All rights reserved.

This presentation accompanies the book "In-line/On-line: Fundamentals of the Internet and World Wide Web" (ISBN 0-072-90685-5) written by Raymond Greenlaw and Ellen Hepp.