This week, we learned about two different types of internet search facilities- meta search engine and subject directory. It was a pretty informative lesson as I never knew meta search engine existed till that lesson.
Meta search engine, also known as metacrawlers or multi-search engines, transmits the search terms simultaneously to several search engines. This means that if you type your search query at a meta search engine, it searches for results from several search engines such as Google, Yahoo and etc. As this is done simultaneously, a lot of time is saved as you need not visit the different search engines to find for information. I feel that this is really convenient as the time taken to search for informaiton is greatly reduced. Also, as results are searched from a few different types of search engines, there are a higher number of search results. This allows me to have a wider variety of search results to choose from. Examples of meta search engines are http://www.vivisimo.com/, http://www.metacrawler.com/ and http://www.mamma.com/.
For my research, I chose to use http://www.mamma.com/. The search results found on mamma.com was quite different from those found on Google. However, it was relatively as reliable and relevant as google. Also, mamma.com recognises the use of Boolean operators. As such, i am able to refine my search query so as to achieve search results that are more relevant. Another feature that i really liked about mamma.com is the tab bar, which is similar to that found on Windows Internet Explorer. This allows me to have a few search query at the same time. However, unlike metacrawler.com, mamma.com does not show the search engines it uses to search for results. It would have been great if they displayed them so that i am able to determine and use the meta search engine that uses the search engines that i would usually use. Also, mamma.com displays links that are sponsored by some companies. Although some of the sponsored links are relevant to me research topic, most of them are totally irrelevant. It got quite fustrating especially when i realised that out of all the search results displayed in one page, about half of them were sponsored links that are not relevant. This could increase the time taken for me to search for information as i have to go through a few pages before i am satisfied with the information i have gathered.
Another internet search facility that we were introduced to is subject directories. Subject directory, also known as subject catalog, is a human-compiled database. There are many different subjects/categories which users can choose and select to browse for information. This search facility is convenient and helpful only to a certain extent as it may be quite time consuming to use unless you are really sure what category/subject to choose. One feature that was helpful is the keyword searches, which is similar to that of other internet search facilities. Examples of subject directories are http://www.galaxy.com/ and http://www.go.com/.
For my research, i have chosen to use http://www.galaxy.com/. I think my experience using galaxy.com was an unpleasant one as it was quite challenging when it came to determining which category to choose. Eventually, i decided to try every category that were highly possible. However, i was still unable to find the desired results. During the lesson, we were told that subject directories have a small number of pages, with search results in the low millions. This was supposed to be more convenient as the results are likely to be more reliable and relevant to the search query. However, i feel that this is a weakness as the number of search results may come up to be too little. In my case, when i choose from one category to another, the number of search results decreased quite dramatically to as low as 2! Even so, it did not provide me with the necessary information. It was at this point of time that i gave up and used the keyword search feature instead which yield reliable and relevant search results.
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