Tuesday, January 9, 2007

Module 4: Search Engines

TASK 1: Search the words - 'advanced internet users' - using a common search engine.

Results as follows:

Answer: I used the 'Google' search engine for this and got the following result:
(Results 1 - 10 of about 126,000,000 for advanced internet users. (0.07 seconds)
FIRST HIT: The first 'hit' for the recommended search was: CIESE website.
NUMBER OF HITS: about 126,000,000

TASK 2: Search 3 search engines - including the 'deep' web.

Results as follows:

Answer: I used 'Copernic Desktop Search' for this task. The search result was 59 hits.

Differences?
Answer: The most outstanding difference is the number of hits on both the search engines. 'Google' got 126,000,000 hits whereas 'Copernic' only got 59 hits. Another difference was the the time it took for the results to come up - 'Google was much faster.

Why?
Answer: I think that the enormous difference in the number of hits is because 'Google' searched for each word in ("advance" "internet" "users") as individual words and as a phrase whereas 'Copernic' searched it as a phrase only. Also, less websites are registered with 'Copernic' compared to 'Google'.

Which search showed the best results?
Answer: At first glance 'Google' seems better because of the number of hits and the speed at which it got the results. Also, there are more choices in the 'Google' search results. The 'Google' search engine can also be modified more to get more refined searches.

TASK 3: To record 5 hits each of the two searches.

Answer: First 5 hits for 'Google':
  1. http://www.k12science.org/tutorials/advanced/
  2. http://www.k12science.org/tutorials/advanced/saveweb.html
  3. http://www.vicnet.net.au/training/advance.html
  4. http://www3.uwm.edu/sce/course.cfm?id=6835
  5. http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/global/asiapac/news/2005/pr_09-21.html

Answer: First 5 hits for 'Copernic':
  1. http://cfprod.imt.uwm.edu/sce/course.cfm?id=6835
  2. http://www.softstack.com/advink.html
  3. http://www.internet2.edu/
  4. http://netforbeginners.about.com
  5. http://www.k12science.org/tutorials/advanced/

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