Roman Baths
The Trail on Roman Baths is worth exploring in a little more detail, to examine how a student might follow the clues on the page.

The obvious thing to do is to enter "baths" into a search engine, but we'll assume that even freshmen know better than that. Let's try "Roman baths" and to begin with let's try it at Yahoo and MSN, two very common portals that students are likely to know about. There are some good hits there, but you don't have to go very far down the page to start finding references to "romantic". This is because just typing the phrase into the field really means find all pages with "roman" OR "baths" and substrings are allowed (hence "romantic").

The way to restrict the search is to enclose the phrase in quotation marks. Doing so returns a mere handful of hits. Is this all the Internet has to offer? By no means; but we shall have to turn to other search sites to get better results. MSN does better, but we don't really have to tolerate the pop-up ads. There are much better search sites around.

AltaVista is a venerable search site. Searching on "Roman baths" there reveals some of the the peculiarities of these tools though. One of the hits is for "roman bath faucets" even though we plain said "baths" in the plural. Some places are just too helpful for their own good. Rather than go through Excite and Lycos and the rest, let's turn to my own favorite: Google.

First of all, no annoying popups, and a page that loads really fast. Second, it doesn't turn plural into singular; but it does split the phrase up even when we enclose it in quotes. Clicking to the Advanced Search option, though, brings up some powerful tools. There we can specify a requirement to use the exact phrase in its entirety. Even better, we can specify domains, which means we can tell Google to return only stuff on Roman baths found at edu sites. Doing so gives us a far different picture of what's available.

And, speaking of pictures, clicking over to the Images tab brings up lots of pictures of Roman baths. This can be highly motivating for students and can lead them down still other paths.

I set the Trail for Roman Baths expecting students to talk about how the Romans heated the water and so on. Instead, the discussion quickly veered off into a discussion of whether or not public baths were "cesspools of disease" to use one student's phrase. I argued otherwise, but a couple of students were certain they'd heard this and so they dug deeper and came up with references. This opened the door to a discussion of the reliability of sources (remember, this is a Net-focused exercise from beginning to end).