Practical 4 & 5: Using Different Internet Search Facilities

In this practical, Ms Faridah introduced us about different types of search facilities. They are

• Search engine
• Meta search engine
• Subject directory

After that, I identified the keywords from my research topic and also their variations. The following is the list of keywords and variations:

Keyword	Keyword variations
development	improvement, growth, expansion, increase, maturity, advance
Internet	online
social	societal, community
network	group
service	-

The search phrase I used is

(development* OR growth* OR expansion* OR increase* OR maturity OR advance) AND (Internet OR online) AND social AND network AND service

I used Google, MetaCrawler and Yahoo! Directory as different kinds of search facilities.

The following is the summary of the search results:

Google (search engine)
Numbers of hits - 484000
Related resource - JCMC Online Journal
Comments
Results are ranked in order of the relevancy. Displayed different types of resources such as search results from Google Video, online journals, as well as pdf files. Therefore, I conclude that google search provides relevant search results ranked in their relevancy and also provides search from other types of media such as videos, scholar reports, and as well as online books.

MetaCrawler (Meta search engine)
Numbers of hits - 77
Related resource - Nil
Comments
The meta crawler provides search results from different types of search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and Windows Live. But the search results are not very relevant and it does not produce any relevant result about my research topic.

Yahoo! Directory (Subject directory)
Numbers of hits - 2068
Related resource - Nil
Comments
Most of the results only link to the home page of the websites and not the particular page that contains the search term. When performing search for my topic, could not find any relevant result. One useful thing is that I can browse through the different categories and sub-categories which allowed me to explore the list of web-sites which are related to the particular category.

After doing research, I noticed that there were similarities and differences among different types of search facilities.

All three search facilities arrange and display the search results in the similar format as follows.
Title of the web page (clickable, when user click on the title, it will leave the search result page and navigate to the web page of the web resource)
Excerpt of the text within the page which contains the search keywords (short description)
URL to the web resource

What I have learnt
After doing practical, I fully understood how to use search engine's operators such as boolean operators, truncation, etc. Before that I did not have knowledge about how to use them. I also learnt the strength of the use of appropriate keywords combined with operators to form a search phrase. It have much impact on the search result as they can limit the number of results to most relevant ones and can minimize the occurrences of unrelated links in search results list.

If I were to do research for my current topic before I took UIR, I would not use any boolean operators. I would use normal phrase such as "social network service". But it would result in millions of search results and most of them will be irrelevant. I will need to take much time looking for useful result. However, after I learnt about boolean operators, my search results are narrowed down significantly. Most importantly, they are much more relevant and useful information for my research topic.