1) I tried to answer "Why is the sky blue?"
2) First I typed sky-blue.
3) I first used google,yahoo, then ask.com
4) a. I used a hyphen between my search terms.
b. I used a hyphen
5) a.I evaluated my results by looking at the various results and judging them by what I was looking for, which was the scientifical aspect as to why the sky is blue.
b. Althought the different search engines gave me similar and in some cases identical results(web pages) I think that GOOGLE focused more on the scientifical side, YAHOO leaned more towards the public opinion and entertainment, and ASK had the greatest variety(scientifical, merchendise, public interest...)
c. I think that the search engines behaved differently because they tend to have different "searchers" or "audiences". I found GOOGLE to be more informational because people who searh on google are usually students. I found out that yahoo tends to advertise and give you more artsy answers. When I used Yahoo I got music lyrics and other srtsy stuff. I think that Ask has a greater variety of results because you can just type in a whole question and different terms can be used.
6) More interaction?
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First of all, I'm not sure about why you used hyphens. If you were trying to exclude terms, you would need to use a space before the hyphen as well, e.g.,
ReplyDeletesky -blue
That would retrieve results where the web site used the word sky, but the word blue never appeared. As you were trying to find out why the sky was blue, that's not your likely goal, so what were the hyphens for?
Also, what other evaluation technique did you use?
These search engines are programmed to retrieve sites based on your search terms and are not oriented to selecting based on discipline (science vs. public opinion, for example). These are machine searches; no human being is involved, so no judgments of that kind are made.
As for typing in a whole question, you can always do that, but it's not effective searching. Ultimately, you will run into difficulties with that approach. Stick to terms. This will become very important as we move into other types of information sources, such as the catalog and databases.
As another point, your evaluation of relevancy is a good one, but you also need to use other criteria, such as the authority or credibility of a site.
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