- What question did you try to answer?
What is the World hunger population? - What search engine or engines did you use?
Yahoo and Google, which apparently are the most popular ones. - Questions about search
3a. Which search terms did you use?
- World hunger population
- World hunger or population
3b. How many results did you get when you entered your terms?
How many did you get when you used OR?
Which set was bigger? Can you figure out why?
-World hunger population
Yahoo: 20,600,000
Google: 2,250,000
- World hunger or population
Yahoo: 20,700,000
Google: 439,000
Th e sets of "Or" on yahoo had a result of 100,000 more and I believe it is because the way the topic was worded gave it a wider range of things it could fall under and as for google it was alot less, and Im not quite sure but maybe it is because google needs more specific wording. - Evaluation: http://www.worldhunger.org/
+ What questions did you use to evaluate your result?
I questioned whether the sites were credible or not, I checked for extensive data and currency.
+What conclusion did you draw about the value of the site and why?
I concluded that this a valid site because they have accurate information along with contact info and site services, you can easily contact website member to make sure. - Having conducted this research activity, what questions came into your mind that you could use to continue your exploration?
How should I word my search when inputting it into the search engine as well as finding valid credible sites.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Research Log Activity and Entry
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Sometime last year, yahoo announced that it had revamped its search engine and that it now contained more sites than Google. Of course, how important that is when you can't view millions of sites is another matter.
ReplyDeleteI repeated your searches today and got these results for Google:
world population hunger
436,000
world population or hunger
435,000
world population OR hunger
49,800,000
If you are going to use OR as a boolean operator, it must be in capital letters. As you can see OR IS MORE. The number jumped much higher with the use of OR as a boolean operator.
In yahoo, I got these results:
world population hunger
20,000,000
world population or hunger
20,000,000
world population OR hunger
528,000,000
Same situation.
Keep in mind, also, that with both these sites AND is a default operator, so the systems are really searching
world AND population AND hunger
With the use of "or" in lower case, you are searching
world AND population AND or AND hunger
in the case of google
and
world AND population AND hunger
in the case of yahoo (the numbers of results are the same)
Lower case "or" is treated as a stop word and the system is programmed to skip over that word. The numbers are the same in yahoo, slightly different in Google. The reason for that is probably because Google gives you more exact numbers of results and there are probably a few sites where lower case "or" is not separate, i.e. with a space before and after or, so the system can't recognize that it's a stop word.
As for your evaluation, I wish you had told me what site you were evaluating as it's impossible for me to look at it and make my own evaluation. Your criteria are fine; however, when you say that it's easy to contact the web site, if you do, what do you think they will tell you? Nothing that will validate or invalidate your evaluation because they want you to want your site.
aline