Friday, January 9, 2009

Day 3 Reflection-search engines and boolean operators

3rd lesson for the week, and today was quite an interesting day, because I learnt how to narrow down searches on the search engines and find the specific topics I am looking for. At first I thought that I knew everything about search engines and how to search the internet on the search engines and thought that this lesson is redundant, but once I did the practical and tried it on the search engine, I was stunned to see that it really works. How cool is that?
The simple bracket or stars and the words "AND" and "OR" can help filter out unecessary search results and help you attain and find what you are really looking for.
Also today I learnt about the existence of the search engine, Google Scholar. It serves a different purpose than Google. There are pros and cons to both sites.
Google searches any documents containing the search topic, and the materials are from anywhere, such as blogs, forums and such, and also even videos, while Google Scholar searches full text documents and materials and shows results of journals from professionals and experts, and it covers more websites.
In Google, Not all the results listed are relevant, and the list is long and some contain irrelevant topics. Google Scholar shows results which are very much relevant and the results show those that are professional.
Google lists out any sites that contain the topics, and lists them out in different formats, such as videos and media, but not all the results are reliable and not all the results are necessary.
Google Scholar, on the other hand, is more reliable as the results are those that are written from the professionals and experts, but does not list out personal sites that give out personal thoughts or discussions, which might be useful, especially if you are searching for problems within public.
Both search engines are effective in helping me find my resources related to the topic. Google lists out results which vary from personal to professional entries. Google Scholar narrows it down to professional entries. There are pros and cons to both search engines, but they are very much useful for my research. Google can list out results that can personal, and from this I can find materials which are relevant when I need to search for problems and personal feelings of people. Google Scholar lists out those written by experts and is more reliable, especially if I need to research on numbers and expert experimentations

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