Friday, January 16, 2009

  1. What question did you try to answer?

    How does music help people to relax?

  2. What terms did you select to begin?

    To begin, I selected three terms:
    1. Music
    2.
    People
    3.
    Relax


  3. What web search engine or engines did you use?

    I used Google, Yahoo! Search, and AOL.

  4. Search Techniques

    a.) What search terms did you use?

    I used different the terms “Music,” “People,” and“Relax” to conduct my search.

    b.) What search techniques did you use?

    I used BOOLEAN

    1. People Relaxing/Music
    2. “People Relaxing” +
    Music


  5. Evaluation

    a.) How did you evaluate your results?

    I used C.A.R.D.I.O. to evaluate my results.
    Currency, Authority, Relevance, Depth, Information Type & Objectivity

    b.)
    What conclusions did you draw about the different search engines?

    • What the same?

      Each search engine offered news, images, and maps

    • What was different?
      Each search engine had different search features

    • Differences in number of results

      I found that Yahoo! Search had the most results, followed by Google, and then AOL. In the first search, Yahoo! Search and Google were very close in their results. (Yahoo! Search - 31,000,000 and Google 21,100,000 ) Then AOL with the lowest search of (499,000). In the second search, Yahoo! again had the highest results (41,700). Google and AOL had low number of results (Google - 14,000 and AOL- 2,380)

    • c.) Why do you think the search engines behaved as they did?
  6. I think the reason Yahoo! turned out giving the most results is because their website is now more updated. Google being the second most updates and AOL being the last.

  7. What other questions came into your mind as you carried out this exercise?

    Another question that came into my mind was why do people turn to music to relax instead of other sources?

1 comment:

  1. You have a wonderfully analytical mind. Sometime in 2007, yahoo upgraded its search engine and made a big splash about retrieving the largest numbers of results and it seems that this is the case. Why one needs them, when millions of results are already available is not clear to me, but they're there!

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