Research Log Entry - Unit 2, Assignment 2

1. Your topic string
a. Your broadest topic
Hurricanes

b.Your next broad topic
Hurricanes in Gulf of Mexico

c. Your starting topic
Hurricanes in the United States

d. Your narrower topic
Hurricanes in Alabama

e. Your even narrower topic
Hurricane Frederic of 1979

2. Think of two questions that you could ask about your topic
a. How many people were killed or injured by Hurricane Frederic?
b. How much financial damage was caused by Hurricane Frederic?

Unit 1 Part 2 Research Log Entry

• 1.What question did you try to answer?
What steps make up the nitrogen cycle?

2.What terms did you select to begin?
Nitrogen cycle

3.What web search engine or engines did you use?
Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com

4.Search techniques
a.What search terms did you use?
The terms I used were "Nitrogen Cycle" and "Steps of nitrogen cycle"
b.What search techniques did you try?
I tried altering the order of words and included "and" into my search whenever possible to narrow the search.

5.Evaluation
a.How did you evaluate your results?
I evaluated them by the number of results provided to me, as well as the relevance of the sites near the top of the list.
b.What conclusions did you draw about the different search engines?
I noticed that Yahoo gives the greatest number of results, with ask.com providing the fewest. However, I believe that those results provided by google are usually more reliable than the other two, from personal experience.
Consider
i. what was the same?
A lot of the sites presented at the top of the lists on each of the sites were usually the same
ii. what was different?
The order in which the websites were positioned on the lists varied from engine to engine.
iii. Differences in numbers of results
Yahoo: 12,700,000
Google: 7,270,000
ASK: 584,000
iv. etc.
c.Why do you think the search engines behaved as they did?
I believe that yahoo had a wider selection of sources because they do not filter their sites as much as the other two. Google is known for delivering quality search results with a higher rating than the other two sites, and I believe that this is due to the filtering that they do. And as for Ask, I believe that this is just a sub par search engine in general.

6.What other questions came into your mind as you carried out this exercise?
I was wondering if there were other ways that you can narrow your search that I don't know about at this time.

_______________________________________________________

1.What is Delicious?
An online service that keeps tracks of web bookmarks for you


2.What is the advantage of this Web 2.0 tool?
It allows you to save bookmarks to an online service, which makes them accessible to you from any computer anywhere. It also makes the entire process quicker and more efficient.


3.Do you think you might use it? If so, why? If not, why not?
I personally have already tried this service, and was not all that impressed. It may be because I do not bookmark all that many pages or anything like that. However, who knows, there may come a time in my life that this service will be rather useful to me.

Research Log Entry

I. Research Log Entry – 1 point

There were a number of concepts presented this week:
1.) Which did you know already?

-I already had the general idea of the entire C.A.R.D.I.O. concept before going through this powerpoint, however, I had never actually sat down and thought about it. It was just something that I would do without knowing or thinking about it. I also knew about the whole Boolean searching on how to improve your searches through search engines such as google.


2.)Which were new to you?

-I did not really learn anything that I didn't know before, it was more just having the information presented to me in a way that I had never seen it before.

If you were given a research assignment and you chose the web as one strategy for your search, name three important evaluation elements you need to consider.
1.)C.A.R.D.I.O.
2.)Who is the author of the article?
3.)Is it credible?



II. Research Log Activity and Entry – 4 points

1. What question did you try to answer?

In what ways did Europeans influence the Native Americans?

2. What search engines did you use?

I used google.com as my search engine.

3. What search terms did you use?

1. European influence on Native Americans
2. European influence and Native Americans
3. European influence or Native Americans

4. How many results did you get when you entered your terms? How many did you get when you used "or"? Which set was bigger? Can you figure out why?

1. European influence on Native Americans
Google results-294,000

2. European influence and Native Americans
Google results-300,000

3.European influence or Native Americans
Google results-306,000

The results with "or" was the bigger set of results. The word "or" in my search made the results expand more than the other two searches because it responds to the two components of "European Influence " and "Native Americans"

Evaluation-http://www.nativeamericans.com/Natives.htm

I evaluated the web site on what I believe to be three of the most important matters to take into consideration when looking at a website. These are:
*Authority and credibility-who published the web page and are they accredited or endorsed by a reputable organization?
*When was the information published
*The relevancy of the information to my search

1. What conclusion did you draw about the value of the site and why?

I believe that the site is that it is not only credible, but also has extremely useful and relavent information to my search. And the website is hosted by several organizations, making be believe that the information presented is credible.

2. Having conducted this research activity, what questions came into your mind that you would use to continue your exploration?

When searching for this information, I also began to start wondering about the Native Americans influence on the Europeans coming to America.