My UIR Research

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Practical 4 & 5

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

There is so many search engine out there for me to choose which one i would want to use for this practical, and i decide to go with this 3 that is quite common to us.I found out that when i type the same word to search at this 3 search engine, yahoo directory, Google search and Metacrawler, they give me different total of result being found. And another characteristics i found out is the layout design that is different.

Google Search Engine.

Metacrawler Search Engine

Yahoo Directory Search

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

I did 3 different kind of research on yahoo directory, Google search engine and Metacrawler. They each have their own strength and weakness.

yahoo search directory - the result found relating to my research is relevant but somehow it is quite limited as it is done by human and the website is arrange into the category that is state there.

Google search - strength is that the result is more than the yahoo directory search and i will be able to explore on more of other website relating to my research topic but the weakness is that there is too many of them that i do not know which one to start with and it will be quite time consuming to go through all of them.

Metacrawler search - the search result found was all from other search website like yahoo.com, Google.com, MSN search and ask.com. And i am able to see one or two result that is practically not related to what I type to search for.

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

Before i do my research on Google, i did find yahoo directory search is the best that meet my searching needs but after doing my research on Google, I find that Google search is better as there is a lot of different website information about cancer that cannot be found on yahoo directory as maybe it is arrange by human, so it is some how limited resource but still, very reliable.

Reflection

In this lab I learnt how to use different search engine to look for what i want and know that using different boolean the search result will also change.

Y Tuesday, May 13, 2008