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Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Practical 6

Type of search facility : Search Engine

Example : HotBot, Google

Keywords used : Development of mobile phone/devices

URL / Purpose :

HotBot
http://www.mobileshop.org/history/telephones.htm
http://www.mobileshop.org.uk/history/digital.htm

Google
http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php/Mobile_Phone_Technology_-_Future_Development
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3742817

Comments :

HotBot
This search engine is not much reliable because for the first 10 search they have nothing much to do with development of mobile phone , rather, they have development of normal telephone.

Lots of result, and the results are all being ranked

Google
Google search engine did try to find information that’s related to my search topic. And their search results are not rank according to how much relation to my topic.

Type of search facility : Meta Search Engine

Example : Vivisiom, DogPile

Keywords used : Development of mobile phones/devices

URL/ Purpose :

Vivisiom

http://www.sun.com/training/catalog/courses/WJB-460.xml
http://www.mobilephonedevelopment.com/

DogPile

http://mobilephonedevelopment.com/archives/164
http://mobilephonedevelopment.com/archives/86

Comments :

Vivisom
Lots of result. But most of the results are not being rank properly.

This search engine has not much use for me. Firstly in the website, there isn’t much information on development of mobile phones. But it was ranked at the first few results of the search engine. So this conclude that the search engine is not very effective.

This website contains the writer personal thoughts. Though website homepage title stated as “MOBILE PHONE DEVELOPMENT” the contents inside the website has no link to mobile phones development. Rather, it talks about the marketing and sales of mobile phone in these few years. So I can say that this search engine is not useful at all. To me at least.

DogPile
This website has no use to me either. The website is just irrelevant ramblings to the user. But they put the title as “MOBILE PHONE DEVELOPMENT” as well. I don’t understand why the user want to put that as the title, when the information has no link to the title. I think this is misleading to the public.

Well, at last we found something which has link to what I want to research on. This website contains the information of a particular talk seminar the writer attended. And he briefly summarizes what the talk seminar was about. He talks about how it is rather difficult to develop a good functions phone these days, because of how JAVA has evolved.
And how JAVA fragmentation makes mobile phone difficult to use etc. This is a useful website. And I guess the problem with the search engine is that it just go find all the website, but did not rank them well. So the useful, and useless websites are all jumble up together.

Type of search facility : Search Directory

Example : Google Directory, Yahoo!Directory

Keywords used : Mobile phone/devices development

Comments:

As I use this search engine, I get to see lots of search results being shown. But the downside is that all these search results has no link at all to my search topic. As the search engine is organized and group according to theirs own fields. Example : Business, Computers etcAnd I guess I won’t find anything much relevant to my search topic, so I guess I won’t benefit much from this search engine.

Compare the search results. Identify 2 characteristics that make all 3 search facilities similar or different from one another.

2 characteristics that make all 3 search engine facilities similar is that firstly, they all chunk out a lot of search results. But most of them are not really link to my search topic. Secondly, their ranking is mostly a bit off. As in maybe one particular website have nothing relevant to what I type in my search topic, but it was ranked at the first page of the search result.

Do you find any strength/weakness of each of them, in terms of search capability?

The strength of most of them is that mostly got a lot of search results. Ten over pages of search result. And the strength is also one of the weaknesses of these search engines. As you can see, most of them chunk out so many website, that the person searching might not know where to start. And usually the search engines did not rank the search results properly, so the person might go to lots of websites that have no link to his/her search topic. So I guess this is both the strength and the weakness of most search engines.

Overall, which search facility best meet your searching needs? Why?

Meta search engine. Because I get to find relevant, reliable website/search results from that particular search engine. Although the search results are mostly not rank in a proper way, I can still find useful information.

Comment whether your research topic has any co-relation to the purposes of the resources retrieved.

Maybe? Yes there’s a link or co-relation to the purposes of the resources retrieved but their linkage of the research topic to the resources retrieved is to the minimum level.

bittersweet - 12:07 AM