This week,for practical 4 and 5,we need to choose relevant keywords to search for relevant 3 resources.For example,I will be doing on ‘Discuss the impact of drugs abuse on youth’.The keyword will be ‘impact’ and the keyword variations that I managed to find would be ‘effect’,’aftermath’,consequences’,’result’,’outcome’.Next,we need to write down search phrases using Boolean operators such as ‘And’ and ‘Or’.I did three but one example is (impact OR aftermath*)AND (youth* OR juvenile*)AND (drugs*). Next activity would be putting these keywords and type it in this 3 search facilities.They are search engine,subject directory and meta search engine.The example I used for search engine would be http://www.google.com/. For subject directory,the URL I used would be http://www.galaxy.com/. Lastly,for meta search engine,the URL I used would be http://www.metacrawler.com/. You may wonder what are the differences and similarities among the three search facilities.

Differences

• Number of hits retrieved is different for all search facilities.
• ways of searching
• results ranking
• formats
• results display
• layout for three of the search facilities is different in their own way
  
  
  (Examples)
  http://www.galaxy.com/
• navigation bar includes community,latest headline etc.
• place at the top of the search results
  http://www.google.com/
• displays website of search result only
  http://www.vivisimo.com-/
• sources and sites at the left hand corner of webpage

Similarities

• They are search facilities
• They have news or latest headline base on words I am searching for
• Able to search for pictures and videos
• able to sort sites
• rank from latest to later date

Strength

Google(search engine)

• Display 600,000 over results websites relating to the search
• relevance is high if the search terms appears in title,near the top of the page and frequently in the text

metacrawler(meta search)

• Able to view results from other websites such as yahoo,Google,Msn and Aj.com.
• total number of page relating to the search is lesser than search engine's page.
• Only three pages available.
• show recent searches

Galaxy(subject directories)

• Direct me to the specified directory relating to the words I want to search
• keyword searches are allowed

Weakness

Google(search engine)

• Display all or too many websites till it does not show specified
• Frequent changes in the web vs slower indexing process
• display irrelevant results due to a certain language used websites relating to search

metacrawler(meta search)

• Display only 43 results compared to Google’s result
• unstable
• limited to keyword search
• different features from search engine
• do not have their own database of web pages

Galaxy(subject directories)

• Only 6 directories shown pertaining to the words I want to search
• results display,different from search engines
• selective and small size
• subject directories group information
• topical lists arranged in a hierarchical way

3 screenshots of the 3 search facilities...

http://www.galaxy.com/