• 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.
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Search terms: Again, I would skip words like "of" which cloud your search. I would use
ReplyDeletesteps "nitrogen cycle"
for that search. First, AND is supplied. Second, using quotation marks around "nitrogen cycle" treats it as a phrase.
Altering the order of the words will make no significant difference, unless you are working with a search engine that searches only a few characters into a web site (most of them do this to some degree--50 characters in, 100 characters in, etc.).
You write that you think google provides more reliable results from personal experience. From a research perspective, that statement really doesn't hold. To determine reliability, you would have to do a true comparison study, with set criteria for analysis. You would also have to set up a blind study where the searches were done in various search engines without the searchers knowing which engine they were searching because one of the keys is the bias of familiarity. If you are familiar with google, you are more comfortable with it and that biases your view.
The order of the presentation of the sites, which were similar from search engine to search engine is probably due to the different underlying philosophies by which they order the sites--relevance vs. popularity vs. some other method.
Why is ask.com "sub-par"?
In 2007, yahoo make a big splash about having revamped their site and promised to provide more results than any other search engine. This would now appear to be the case. Of course, if you're getting 1 million plus results anyway, I fail to see the appeal because most people don't go past a few screens of results, but they achieved their intent.
There are many other ways of narrowing your search. Using quotation marks is one of the most effective (see my use of quotation marks around "nitrogen cycle," requiring that the search engine provide that string of characters and not use the default AND between the two words. There are also ways of using NOT (through a hyphen), if you looked at the search engine wiki page I directed you to as part of this lesson. There are other examples beyond what's on that wiki page, but I chose to provide what I consider to be the most useful candidates.
A comment on delicious: My main goal with this short assignment was to make sure students were aware of this site, in case they want it in future. I have found it to be most useful because I bookmark many sites and can now access them from any computer, not just the one where I bookmarked a particular site.
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