Wednesday, November 24, 2010,
FOURTH LESSON!
FOURTH LESSON!
Helloooooo! It’s the time of the week again! It’s time . . . for me to update! :D
Today’s lesson was enriching for me! Why do I say so? Because we were introduced to 2 new search facilities! These two search facilities are; Meta search engine and Subject Directory. There were many examples to select from each search facilities and we were task to only select one and compare between the two selected. And it’s time for Round 2 from the previous Round 1 (Google vs. Google Scholar)! This time it’s Metacrawler vs. Yahoo Directory.
I will start off by sharing the 2 new search facilities' features and drawbacks:
Metacrawler
Metacrawler allows users to conduct a single search and receives a number or results from different search engines. In a simpler way of describing it would be 'search the search engines'. This saves time for searching on different search engines. The results shown for my search was only 3 pages long, picking the most relevant materials from each search engines.
With Metacrawler it searches from 4 different search engines or at least for my search "recreation trends among youth"
Using the Metacrawler search, users will not be able to use the strategy search used in Google or other individual search engines. In addition, the Metacrawler search bar has a character limit of 53 characters (I counted).
Yahoo Directory
Yahoo Directory allows user to search on their compiled directory. These directory is compiled by a team of human who makes the decision to classify each materials into categories.
Not only can you do search on the directory itself you can basically browsed the the different category it has.
For Yahoo Directory it currently has 16 different categories to browse from.
After clicking the chosen topic out of the 16, they are furthered categorised into more specific topics.
With the directory organised in such a way, it makes browsing more effective for the user.
Drawbacks:
Since it is human compiled directory, the available results are limited. The search that you might want to search on might not have a category. The user must classify their search into these categories and might not know which it falls under. The searches are also limited to only web and cannot search on images, videos etc.
In conclusion, the prevailing search facility for me is . . . (drum rolls) Metacrawler! The reason being was that it has the relevant searches that I wanted and it only has 3 pages for me to look through (less time consuming). I could do many different searches changing the key words and I had better results. I did not prefer Yahoo Directory because I didn't knew which category did my topic falls under and had a hard time figuring that out and the results were very limited and most of the time it led me to a non-relevant results to what I am searching for.
9:26 PM
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