Module 4 - Evaluating The Web

As a part of the Concepts assignment I was introduced, in no uncertain terms, to the concept of evaluating and annotating my reference sites. At the time I really thought nothing of it and felt it was more a waste of time rather than to my benefit; really why couldn't those 200 words be better used writing ABOUT the concept.

Now with the assignment behind me and finally completing Module 4, I have come to truly appreciate and understand the need for this type of evaluation and annotation. As a direct result, I have become more and more reliant on tagging my bookmarks and writing a brief annotation about the page, if needed. In this manner I have began to really manage the information presented to me and cross reference it for future use.

What really intrigues me though, more and more online resources are allowing Internet users to do this quickly and easily. From social bookmarking with Delicious, Diigo's text highlighting or Google's SearchWiki feature. Browsers are even getting more in on the deal with Firefox now auto suggesting popular tags for sites and allowing notes (annotations) in bookmarks. It seems that information management is really starting to come to the fore.

So as we move forward on the Internet, these type of features are definitly becoming essential to manage the vast amount of information presented to us, and how we use these tools becomes even more important.

Module 4 - Boolean Searching Task

As Google automatically assumes the Boolean operator AND my initial search results were actually pretty limited so you could say there was some room to wriggle.

To achieve absolute maximum results I used the Boolean operator OR between each keyword "desktop OR meta OR search OR osx" and closed up "os x" to "osx". This resulted in an increase from 206,000 results to a more respectable figure of 7,090,000,000. Heh!

Obviously this is not a manageable search as Google is looking for pages which contain anyone of the keywords. To narrow down my results I began by removing the OR operator and changed my keywords "meta search" to "metasearch"; I now had 111,000 results to go through. The really funny part about doing this; results 3 and 4 are my own blog entry regarding the Search Task! Have a look if you don't believe me.

At this stage I felt that my initial keywords were affecting the quality of my results. To try and improve results I switched keywords and included the operators + and - with various keywords. As a result my search of "metasearch software +mac -windows" now yielded only 13,400 results. Much more manageable and of better quality overall (it didn't include my blog entry).

Now, other than using a specialist search engine, I'm not fully aware of a foolproof way to only get results back from university sites. It was mentioned on WebCT to use "+.edu" to achieve this, personally I found that this did not filter results enough. In the end I added "-.com" to my search string and again changed my keywords including adding another Boolean operator. As such my search string was now "(metasearch AND software) +.edu -.com" which gave me 519 mostly results from government or educational sites.

Of course I could have just used the keywords "metasearch software mac" on Google Scholar to get something similar results wise.