- What question did you try to answer?
- What terms did you select to begin?
- 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. Why the Atlantic Ocean is expanding?
2. "Atlantic Ocean expanding", Atlantic Ocean OR Expansion
3. I use google.com, ask.com and yahoo.com
4. a&b) I use "Atlantic Ocean expansion" and Atlantic Ocean AND Expansion with the Boolean Operators and quotation.
5.
a) I evaluate the sites by looking at the publish date, organize, the author, the cite souces, and how close its related to what im looking for.
b)well, i find that yahoo gave me the most unrelated sources. Ask.com and google.com are more helpful this time while looking for my sources. My results for the "Atlantic Ocean expanding" have about the same number of results for the 3 search engines but Atlantic Ocean AND Expansion provided large amount of results.
Ask.com -
"Atlantic Ocean expanding" - 12 results -> very close to what i was looking for
Atlantic Ocean AND Expansion - 204,700 -> lots of unrelated sources
google.com -
"Atlantic Ocean expanding" - 770 -> compare to other sites, this have the most sources ( the first few are helpful)
Atlantic Ocean AND Expansion - 697,000-> define the Atlantic ocean and things about it
yahoo.com -
"Atlantic Ocean expanding" - 17 results -> close related sources
Atlantic Ocean AND Expansion - 10,900,000 ->define the Atlantic ocean and things about it
c) I believed that the quotations helps narrow down the sources to what i was searching for.
6. Some questions comes to mind are:
About how long does it take until the Pacfic Ocean cease to exist?
Why don't the Pacfic OCean Expand?
You are right. Quotation marks will narrow down your answers; you just have to make sure that you are putting quotation marks around the right portions of your search string. For example, in this example, your best search string is
ReplyDelete"Atlantic Ocean" expanding
"Atlantic Ocean" should be adjacent in natural language, so you don't want the search engine to insert AND in between Atlantic AND Ocean, as it would normally do, so you put that part in quotation marks. The automatic insertion of AND between the phrase "Atlantic Ocean" and expanding is good because you might not always see the word expanding next to "Atlantic Ocean."
As for the Pacific Ocean, why do you think it doesn't expand? I don't know the answer to this, but it occurs to me that if the Atlantic is expanding, the Pacific must also be expanding. An interesting question.