Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Entry # 2
For one of my classes I have to research and write about the concept of social phobias. I used google as my search engine and I found an interesting web page:Psych central . com. I tried to answer " How do phobias come about?". Since this is a casual phrase, I decided to use "phobias the brain. I got approximatly one million results. When I typed it in with I got approximatly 57 million results. That's a big difference! I think it was because of the Boolean searching. The word AND combines two things together while OR separates the search and gives you more results. For my search I questioned CURRENCY, because new technology in the medical field is always changings so I needed a currenta article. I considered AUTHORITY as well. The page I read is set up by doctors not a medical student. Also OBJECTIVITY, I want information about my topic, not somebody trying to sell me something. The object of that site was clear, they simply want to give the public pure information. After performing this search I realized that C.A.R.D.I.O is very important when it comes to researching. C.A.R.D.I.O helps you find the exact page that you want to read and use valid information from.
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Interesting question. In your search string, the word "the" is generally a stop word, that is, the programming is set to skip over that word. You could just enter
ReplyDeletephobias brain
The system is programmed to provide the boolean operator AND, so the search is actually
phobias AND brain
When you substitute OR (in capital letters)
phobias OR brain
you get more results. Your analysis of the reason is correct.
Your evaluation is okay, but I'm still not entirely convinced about this site. This is a .com site, but it does apparently have information from doctors. Of course, anyone can say they're a doctor, but the site has been endorsed by reliable sources, listed on the bottom. There's also a link to the CEO & founder on the About page and while Dr. Grohol's Psy.D. is from Nova Southeastern University (not a noted institution), he does have some credentials. Anything I'd find on his site, however, I would verify on another site, probably one that contained information from a doctor recognized and trained at a more acceptable university.
You are missing the additional questions to continue your research.