Thursday, January 24, 2008 - The Search Operators :

This week, we did the practical that was to help us with our assignment 1. It was an interesting practical exercise as i finally tried out the different search facilities that i have learnt in the other lessons. Search facilities such as the meta search engine and subject directories. I've also learnt that the way we phrase our search, our keywords and the boolean operators in between are extremely important in order to retrieve a good search result.

So anyway, a meta search engine as i have mentioned before works like a combination of many different search engine. Sounds convenient and good right? In fact, it is not. Although the results retreived consists of a variety of websites from different search engine's index, many operators such as " " or AND, cannot be used. Some of the meta search engine does not recognise those operators. I find that using the original search engine such as google itself can result in a far better search as compared to the meta search engine.

What is the most interesting is the subject directories search i made. It returned alot of websites that are related to what i was searching. Compared to google, which might sometimes return you junk. I tried searching many different things in the subject directories, and all the results returned were useful. However, the number of results returned might sometimes be pathetically little.

It was an interesting lesson, and would definitely help in my future projects!

Fats RANTS 6:24 PM