EIR09

5January2010

4th Lesson
Lecture 3
Practical 4 & 5

Blog Reflection:
Briefly reflect on lessons learnt from this practical via your EIR blog (and twitter):
1. What benefits do you get when using different search facilities to search for resources related to your topic?
2. How do you feel about using site feeds in your blog?
3. What do you like best about collaborating on Wiki with other students who share similar research topic as you?

Today I learned about two more search engines which I did not hear before - Meta Search Engines and Subject Directory.Meta Search Engines have cute names like Mamma, Meta Crawler, Vivisimo and more. Meta Search Engines actually transmits search terms simultaneously to several search engines like Google Search, Yahoo, Bing and more. They do not have their own database of their web page. Their hits are only 70, not much compared to Google Search itself which is 4,240,000 hits. Information I got from Meta Search Engines are helpful and relevant to my topic. They are also current issues.

Another search engine I had learned is Subject Directory. Their hits are slightly more than Meta Search Engines but information given are not relevant to my topic and are limited. The topics are organized from general to specific so browsing is more effective. The difference between both is that Search Engines are machine-complied while Subject Directories are human-complied. Search Engines are huge number of pages in database, hundred of millions while Subject
Directories are small number of pages database, low million.


Reflection 1:
What benefits do you get when using different search facilities to search for resources related to your topic?

I am able to collect more information which cannot be done by one search facility.Using different search facilities, I can compare and cross-reference to see whether the information is reliable and relevant to me. With different search facilities being used, I will get different search results.


Reflection 2:
How do you feel about using site feeds in your blog?

It allows me to keep track on news or information easily by linking people's blog to mine. This helps me to broaden my knowledge and mind. It makes it easy to access just with one click on the link and I get to other webs.


Reflection 3:
What do you like best about collaborating on Wiki with other students who share similar research topic as you?

It helps me to save time in researching as they posted the topic on Wiki. I will know more information about my topic even before I start researching on net. I am able to add new information on Wiki by adding a new thread. If I find out there is wrong information about the topic which people had added in, I could just edit it easily.

Labels: Practical 4 and 5

posted by Kai'en @ 1:00 PM