- What web search engine or engines did you use?
- Search techniques
- What search terms did you use?
- What search techniques did you try?
- Evaluation
- How did you evaluate your results?
- What conclusions did you draw about the different search engines? Consider
i. what was the same?
ii. what was different?
iii. Differences in numbers of results
iv. etc.
- Why do you think the search engines behaved as they did?
- What other questions came into your mind as you carried out this exercise?
Answers:
1) I used Google, Msn , Yahoo
2a) Rims, Wheels, Tires
2b) I just put in key words to what I am looking for to see what kind of results I would get. (i.e "Rims", Tires and Wheels, Rims and Tires.
3a) Google gave me: Results 1 - 10 of about 22,900,000 for rims
Msn: 1 - 10 of 623,000,000 for wheels
Yahoo: 1 - 10 of 283,000,000 for tires
3b) Every search engine gave me brands of the tires wheels and rims and all three listed had the brands in different order. All the number of results were all different. Some had more and some had less.
3c) I think the search engines behaved like they did is because the keywords were to general and it just listed anything that was typed in.
4) Questions that came to mind when I was searching was how and why the orders came and how did the keyword lead the search engine to pop up Brands.
I'm glad to see this posting to know that you are able to manage the technology.
ReplyDeleteSome points about your searches:
Perhaps because this is your first posting, you aren't using some of the techniques that I had hoped you would use--Boolean operators, the other techniques on the search engines wiki pages. You are right to say that your terms are too general.
It's good that you put words in, though, rather than whole sentences or long phrases. That helps retrieve better results.
You are right to say that search engines will list any site that contains the terms you supply. That's true whether your search is complex or simple, constructed with nesting or boolean operators or just words.
It's important that you experiment with some of the more sophisticated search techniques. We will use them again and again through class, in order to retrieve results from various information sources, not just the web.
The order of the results is based on the programming code that sorts the results. There are a number of ways to do that--relevancy, popularity, etc. Also, brand pop-ups are due to advertising dollars.