Search Engine

Search Engines such as Google, Ask Jeeves, or Yahoo can be a ton of help, as long as you know how to use them properly. Have you ever needed do some research on a topic and you spend hours looking up the information you need on a search engine when you could have found what you needed in a few minutes, its probably because you are not using the search engines properly. To find what you need you must use keywords and remove anything that you probably don't need from your search, this will eliminate many unneeded sites from your search. The Keyword Challenge is a great game that will teach you how to identify what keywords are and what words you probably don't need in your search. When I played the game I found out that when I do searches I normally use many extra words in the search engine which would make it harder to find the information I need. This game can be a bit frustrating though because it separates words into 4 different categories of importance; these categories range from keywords, words that could help you find what you need, and words that you don't need in your search. Even if you can't get 100% in this game, most likely you can still find what you need when using a search engine.
If you want to strengthen your search engine ability you should play Live Search Challenge. In this game you must use your own skills that you learned from the Keyword Challenge to answer a question that the game will give you. The answer to the question is somewhat hard to find using a search engine, and this is how the game shows you that keywords are important when searching for information.

Anti-Phishing Phil

Phishing attacks are a type of scam with the intent of capturing personal information such as Social Security numbers, online banking user identification numbers, debit and credit card account numbers, and passwords. Many people can not identify what a phishing attack looks like, and even with resources like eBay's spoof e-mail tutorial and FTC's phishing prevention guide , these people will still go on unable to identify a phishing attack. I think it is important for people to be able to identify at least the most basic types of phishing attacks because they are so simple to ignore, but they can cause much damage.

After playing the game Anti-Phishing Phil I could understand how the game was much more effective in teaching people then traditional resources like eBay's spoof e-mail tutorial etc.. The reason I think that the game is much more effective is because it is a game; when people play a game they want to win, so after the first round when most people can not identify web site spoofs, they actually read and try and remember who to identify them so by level 2 they can identify them in the game and they can win. Also the game made it very simple to identify phishing scams because it would break apart URL addresses and show you what each part is, and in doing so teach you the basics of what a URL is, and then the game shows you what phishing scams do to the URL so they can steal information.