Practical 4 & 5

In this practical I have to select certain keywords to research on my topic and the keywords I used were, music, industry, teenagers and trend. I had to use a list of variations in the search to get out the most relevant results.

Next I had to compare the effectiveness between 3 search facilities, google, yahoo and metacrawler.

Google: search algorithm is based on PageRank. PageRank depends on people votes on the website to boost its “rank” so that when people have searched for something in relevance to the website, it would be selected to be shown compared to a page with a lower “rank”. These “ranks” are based on how important and how high quality the website may be.
To get a good match for the query searched, google checks for the number of times the term appears on a page too.

MetaCrawler: does not have their own databases of their webpages and therefore it transmit queries to several search engines.

Search directories: human compiled compared to search engines which are machine compiled, therefore are small in number of pages in the database.

• All three website gave a different amount of relevant topic when their search engines were used.
• Google does not take the “and” into consideration when searching but rather it uses the “and” to combine two search words.
• Metacrawler takes the “and”into consideration when searching and it searches out results with “and” also.
• Yahoo directory search does not take not of the “and” but rather the keywords in the search. However, it does not look for results with the key word but rather look under categories which fit the keyword and then look for websites related to that category.

Strength and weaknesses of each of the search engines;

Google: Search engine was very useful as variations were allowed and search result were relevant to the search topic.

For an example: “music industry and teenagers trend were the keywords used. I got results with relevance to both music industry and impact teenagers, which helped me get into the result of how music industry impacts on teenager.

MetaCrawler: Search engine did not allow variation as it included the variation in the search results as well.

For an example: “music industry and teenagers trend” were the keywords used. I got results with relevance to “music, industries or both together”, “teenager, impact or both together” and “and”. This messed up my search alittle as a lot of irrelevant results appear. However I was still able to get the topic out after awhile.

Yahoo directory: Search engine did not search for topics with my keywords but rather with categories with relevance to my keywords.

For an example: “music industry and teenagers trend” were the keywords used. I got results with the category of music as music is in one of the yahoo directories, which refered me to website in relevance to music, but not about industry and teenagers.

In my opinion, I prefer google to the other two search engines as I feel that google provides me with more relevant query results and that I can relate better to them.