Practical 4 & 5

Practical 4 & 5 is to make a Boolean phrase for the search facilities and compare them in three different search facilities. The three search facilities include
Search engines
Meta search engine
Subject directory

The phrase used is (“Development” OR Improvements*) AND Growth* AND(Cancer OR Illness*) AND (Research OR Finding)
The comparison is


Type of Search facility

Keywords used
URL of the resource
Comments on Search Results :
-Size of hits?

Search Engine

Example used : Google

(“Development” OR Improvements*) AND Growth* AND(Cancer OR Illness*) AND (Research OR Finding)
http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/news
/archive/pressreleases/2008/april/424481

This search gived 3,640,000 in .13 second.
The phrase used to reduce the size of the result from 199,00000.
Meta Search Engine


Example used :metacrawler

(“Development” OR Improvements*) AND Growth* AND(Cancer OR Illness*) AND (Research OR Finding)
www.healingcancernaturally.com/cancer-diet-and-nut...
This search facility gived 42 results.

Subject Directory

Example used : Yahoo -

(“Development” OR Improvements*) AND Growth* AND(Cancer OR Illness*) AND (Research OR Finding)
http://www.aacr.org/
This search facility gived 587 results in .38 sec.

Comparison between he search facilities

All the three search facilities have there own advantages and disadvantages. The difference I found in the three search facility is the number of results they give for the search. The most number of search results was given by search engine followed by directory and Meta search engine. There is also difference in the time taken for each search option to display results.

Strengths of each search facilities

Google search engine is more effective in giving more number of results. The results that I get are more relevant to the topic. Google use software’s to go through the data base of website and find out the website with relevant keywords. Meta search engine pass the keyword to different search engines and they do not own there database of web pages. Meta search engines are faster in the sense that the results given are accurate to relevance and are fast. They also show the top result compared to clustered result they get. Yahoo directory also known as subject catalog are arranged in a particular order so that the user can select category and also can search through keywords. Yahoo directory are virtual libraries maintained by information specialist so the information available from the directory are reliable and credible.

Search facility I liked

The best search facility according to my opinion is Google. Google gives more number of results compared to other search options. So if we cannot find sufficient information from one source we can use the other links in the Google to result to get more information. Google also provide advanced search options facility which will auto generate Boolean keyword phrase. This will help to reduce the time of searching by using different keywords. Google also have software’s to go through the databases and find out the most relevant search result. The layout and interface of Google are simple so that it is more user friendly to the user.