TGIF

Thank Gooodness It's Friday! =)



Greetings, & just to say, its been a week of EIR. Nevertheless, lessons go on, & today's class was about Google & Googling - sort of. Ok actually we r taking insights into search engines, how they work & then to compare between a search engine's features, a meta search engine & subject directories. But of course, we earlier looked at the use of Boolean operators & how it helps make our searching more accurate to our needs.



Comparing between search engines & directories, there are a couple of differences..

• search engines are machine compiled while directories are human compiled (sort of info put into specific folders)

thus...

• search engines return worth millions of results & varied in form, while directories only have a pool of low millions, thus limiting results to specific stuff.

Lets also talk about meta search engines. Surprisingly I've never heard of these. hmm... Well, these are search engines which send out the keywords typed in to various engines & when results are returned, they compile & rank the results specific to the user. Pretty smart way to search the WHOLE of cyberspace.

For today, we are also asked to give our take on Google's search features. I have been a relatively frequent user of Google search engine most of my school life & I personally am impressed by its functions, quick returns & its large pool of websites to search from. It has the largest listings & I like the way it gives quite accurate results.

However, I think that Google doesn't have a distinguishing feature for ranking its results when we do searches. I think that it would be very helpful & easier for users to see a ranking so as to easily evaluate if the websites listed are reliable/frequently visited by other users. Nevertheless, it has been very easy to use its main search facilities as they are straightforward & have clean interfaces.

Citations & bibliography are important. We have to always quote the sources we research from or take our info from. This is in respect of the individual's or organisation's intellectual properties. It is never right to take other's works as ours, or atleast out of basic courtesy, do give recognition to the people who gave us the info we need in our research.

Bibliographies then is a compilation of the citations we took from all the resources in any 1 project. Hmm..I do feel that it is also a good way to come back & refer to the sources whenever we need to, especially when correcting or evaluating the info we need.

OK, I'm tired out just doing this. Its worth the while i guess, & I did learn quite a bit of stuff probably alien to me prior to this class. Thanks for taking a look at my blog. Have a nice day.