Its a new week on Blk 8 & things are spicing up with drafts of reports & 1st submissions to prepare. EIR is also not missing out on the action.
For yesterday (Tues Jan 13th) we finished up on the practical worksheet we had been working on from friday, i.e to compare between two search engines. Today, instead we are comparing between a meta search engine & a subject directory. & my weapons of choice: Mamma (http://www.mamma.com/) versus Yahoo! Directories (dir.yahoo.com).
Personally, I prefer directories, sort of because they are...well...direct. This is re-inforced by the fact that Yahoo!'s directories are mainly headed by the main search engine, & I find this one particular function in its search engine tool that is very interesting: the search within 'directory' option. So, as you narrow down into the category that is of most relevant or close to my own research topic, I can go a step ahead by searching within the directory for a relevant source.
Eg, searching "green design" within the Art & Humanities directory.
Mamma.com however has let me down abit. Well, that is because it is not giving me many results & it is not very relevant to my research topic. Most of the results obtain direct me towards websites of other fields of design & these are not applicable for my research.
However there were probably a couple of consolation items like the search refining suggestions on the right pane of the Mamma.com website.
There are benefits when I use the different resources to do research. It is as if I am getting many people's opinions. You get the analogy right? So there, some Internet resources are just not suitable for certain topics of interest or research queries, but maybe, when you combine the use of search engines, meta search engines, directories & databases, then the results obtained will be fairly good, relevant, & useful for my project.
Well, that's enough for now. tata.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment