Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Practical 4 & 5
For practical 4 & 5, we have to do some research with online search facilities such as search engine, metacrawler and subject directory.
as mentioned above, there'll be 3 facilities that we have to use. for me, i'll be engaging
google for search engine,
metacrawler for meta search engines and
yahoo for subject directory.
before that, there's an important feature available for more efficient search that i want to mention, of which i'll be using for the following searches for my research topic - developments in the area of world fashion design.
AND- narrowing the search, include both phrases
OR – expanding the search, include either of the phrases
AND NOT – restricting the search
for the 3 online search facilities, i'll be using "development of world fashion design" as the initial keywords. the second keywords i use are "(development or advancement) and (world or global) and (fashion design or trend setting)". the reason why the brackets are used in the second keywords, which is said to be more efficient, is so as not to confuse both the search and the researcher. (compared to "development or advancement and world or global and fashion design or trend setting".)
SEARCH ENGINE - GOOGLEthe total number of hits from the initial keywords used are 5,510,000.
the total number of hits from the later with special features are 701,000.
as shown, we can see that the initial keywords used produces more results. this however, does not mean it's efficient. just by browsing through all the results produced by the initial results, we already know that most of them are irrelevant to the thing i'm searching for, which compared to the second keywords, is a waste of time to filter all the irrelevant information.
META SEARCH ENGINE - METACRAWLERthe total number of hits from the initial keywords used are 55.
the total number of hits from the later with special features are 78.
from this result, we can see that the amount of results produced by the 2 keywords used by metacrawler is opposite from google. as i browsed through all the results, i find that in this search facility used, namely meta search engine, both keywords produced results that are mostly relevant to what i intended to find.
SUBJECT DIRECTORY - YAHOOthe total number of hits from the initial keywords used are 59400000.
the total number of hits from the later with special features are 1380000.
just like google, yahoo produces a lot of results from the keywords input. however, it still does not means the more results produced, the more efficient it is. as compared to the first keywords used, the second keywords produced more relevant websites for research which focuses on fashion design globally, rather than any other websites which merely contains a word or two from the keywords input.
all in all, the main message of this entry that i wanted to bring across is that, using the common operators is a method more efficient in doing online research, compared to not using it.
the secondary message that i wanted to bring across with this entry is that, i'd prefer meta search engine when i'm doing online research. this is because the results produced are mostly relevant, and the results produced are far lesser as compared to google or yahoo, which saves a lot of time looking through and filtering. this might be due to the fact that the results it produces are obtained from several other facilities such as google, yahoo and windows live. on a side note, the search suggestions in yahoo, is however very good.
jessyphua 8:20 PM
