Tutorial 4&5 (Reflections)

It has comed to the 5th day, and i will be blogging for lessons 4 and 5, as they are more or less combined. This 2 lessons mainly talks about relevance of searches, and how words can be played to get better and more accurate results. my findings are as below :

1. We learnt Keywords, and variations.
For example if you search this 2 phrases seperately,
terrorism affects world economy & Jihad Organization’s impacts on the global market,
search results would be very similar.

2. Search engine, Meta search engine, Directories.
different engines or directories give different search results. Engines are automated, while a directory is like a library with books that are donated by the public, just like wikipedia.

Q&As

Compare the search results. Identify 2 characteristics that make all 3 search facilities similar or different from one another.

They sort most of the searches by the first words you use. In this case, terrorism. Search engines return results that fit your search exactly, even if it is not relevant. This is not the case for directories.

Do you find any strength/weakness of each of them, in terms of search capability?

Google offers too many search results. That is its greatest weakness. However, they sorted it out by order of relevance and that is their strength. Metacrawler on the other hand, also could bring out the same relevant results Google did, and number of hits were only 80, as compared to Google, with 1.1 million. This easily and clearly proves that metacrawler is more precise, and accurate, with better search capability. As for Yahoo directory, the search returned 0 relevance results as no one has manually slotted this topic into it.

Overall, which search facility best meet your searching needs? Why?

Metacrawler, as explained.

Now that i know what search engines and directories can do, i'm sure i can use the internet to the fullest of my ability when in search for answers.

With this, i conclude my findings for today. :)