P.O.W.E.R. Learning - Robert S. Feldman

Try It! Essay - Search Engine Shoot-out

Finding information in cyberspace can be a daunting challenge. Imagine a library without a card catalogue. The search engine is, in effect, a card catalogue for the World Wide Web.

While all search engines operate in a similar fashion, each has a slightly different method of listing its "hits" or Web site finds. When you type keywords into a search engine, it compares them with a huge index it has compiled from visiting Web pages on the Internet. It uses a program called a spider (or robot, bot, or crawler) that travels through the Web reading sites and sending back the words for indexing. Some spiders read every word on every page located, while others only read the first part of the page or even just the metatags (special lines containing keywords just for spiders).

Hence, in order to be efficient in searching and finding information on the Internet, it is important to become familiar with several search engines and how they work. This exercise will provide you with a means of using and evaluating the major search engines. From the search engines listed below, you will choose four to use in a "shoot-out" to see how they perform in comparison with each other. You will search on each of the topics listed below and keep a record of the number of hits each topic returns, and the degree of relevancy of the information provided in the first 20 hits. Which engine points you to the best information with the least difficulty? When you've finished entering the data from all of your searches, you will submit your final results.

I. Researching the Quality of Search Engines

1. Click on one of the search engines to the right. Its site will appear in a new window.

The Major Search Engines
Altavista
HotBot
Northern Light
Excite
Infoseek
Google

2. Select one of the topics listed below and enter it into the search box on the search engine's Web site. You should get several sites with information about the topic. Scan the first 20 sites, and from the annotations, decide which would be most relevant to your topic. Visit a few of these sites to see if your initial assessment of them and the annotation coincided.

International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Industrial Espionage
Parrot Fish
Learning How to Draw

3. Select the search engine you used from the list in the drop-down menu below. A window will pop up for you to record the number of hits you received, as well as rate the general relevancy of the information for the first 20 sites (high, medium, low).

4. Repeat this process for each topic above using the same search engine you chose for the first topic. Continue to record the results in the window. When you have searched all the topics on this search engine, click 'Submit' to close the window and record your data.

5. Go back to step #1 and repeat the process for each topic using a different search engine until you have worked with four of the six search engines listed above.

6. When you have completed the process for each topic on four different search engines, click on "I'm Done" below to review your results. (Results will open in a new window)

I'm Done

II. Assessing the Quality of Search Engines

1. Which search engine did you find most useful?

2.For what reason did you find it most useful?

III. Citing the Site

It is increasingly necessary to include information found on the Internet in papers and reports, both for school projects and in the workplace. Just as it is academically ethical to include source references for print resources used in reports, it is just as ethical to include references for online material. Revisit four of the sites you researched in Part I of the above exercise, and in the spaces below, write the complete citation as it might appear in a paper you are writing. Select a style that would apply to the discipline of your topic (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) For extensive information and examples of citation styles, visit the Web-sites in the Sources list below.

1. Topic:

Citation:

2. Topic:

Citation:

3. Topic:

Citation:

4. Topic:

Citation:

Sources

http://www.library.american.edu/pathfind/citation.html
Comprehensive guide to many styles of print and electronic citations, including APA, MLA, and Chicago

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/cws/wworkshop/bibliography/mla/mlamenu.htm
Official MLA guide to citing various types of sources, including electronic, as well as extensive information on writing, grammar, bibliographies, etc.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/cgos/idx_basic.html
Columbia University Press Online Citation Guide in an easy-to-use format

http://www.apa.org/journals/webref.html
Electronic reference citations of the APA

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