Friday, November 16, 2007

Practical 4 & 5

For this week lab, I have chosen the topic: “Discuss the developments in Cancer research” for my assignment 1. We were supposed to search for 3 resources using 3 different search facilities. I used the same key words, cancer development research, for all the 3 search facilities.

For Search Engine, I used:

http://www.google.com.sg/
The URL of the resource is http://www.cancer.gov/

For Meta Search Engine, I used:
http://www.metacrawler.com/
The URL of the resource is http://www.aacr.org/

For Subject Directory, I used:
http://www.yahoo.com/
The URL of the resource is http://www.icr.ac.uk/

The 3 search facilities had their results presented in the same format. It shows the link of the resource, as well as the title and description of the resource.
One big difference is the number of results produced. 98,400,000 results were shown on Search Engine. On the Meta search engine, it produced only 60 results and 1398 on the subject directory. Besides that, the results were numbered on both Meta Search Engine and Subject Directory while Search Engine does not have their results numbered.

Search Engine produced quite a number of results. However, most of the time, some of the results are not relevant to what the researchers are searching for.
Meta Search Engine allowed doing searches in tandem with a number of search engines.
Subject Directories allowed users to do keyword searches.

Overall, Search Engine best meet my searching needs. Although it produced results that are irrelevant at times, the first page shows relevant results most of the time. Also, there is “similar pages” on Google Search Engine. It would bring me to links which are somewhat related to my research.

10:30 AM_________________________________________