Practical 3,4 and 5 ----> Search Engine Stuffs

I feel that in today’s world, we rely on Internet heavily for entertainment, research and many other reasons. The Internet is immensely rich world of information. There is a quote that I particularly like; it says ‘If you can’t find your answer on Google, you are screwed.’ Personally, I have been very reliant on Google for research regarding everything I need to know and to discover. Through these even more refined methods of researching online, I learnt that to enhance your search you can use ‘OR’ in between keywords and variations of your keywords, bracket them and put an ‘AND’ in between all relevant information for your search. That is the Boolean Operators working and I find it simple to understand and effective to use.

My chosen topic for research is ‘Discuss the trends and developments on the animation industry in Japan.’ From my findings, there are much talk about negative issues faced by the Japan animation industry but there will still always be a stable market nevertheless due to the external resources by other countries like China or Korea. This art of animation have a long and rich history spanning nearly a century, growing with experimental and innovation all the time. Thus, I believe the trends and developments will always have a constant growth without worries that it will die out anytime soon.

I used the Boolean Operators for my search, and it helped me quicken my findings. Just type it in, and within seconds, I have pages and pages of resources for me to choose. My search query is (Japan OR Nippon) AND (Animation industry OR Anime) AND (Trends OR Movement) AND (Development OR Growth). I will try to add in asterisks( * ) to get different meanings of the same word for some of my keywords like (Trends* OR movements*) because words like these can have many other synonyms. J

Here are some of my search pages:

Google, I searched in the normal search page which we are all usually used to and I like using this the best out of all three search engines. Then I tried the Advanced Search which was not as useful but also good, in the way that it gives us a different approach to searching.

Then, I tried a meta search engine. Metacrawler. Here it is.

Lastly, I tried a subject directory. Yahoo!Directory.

Conclusion

After using Google basic search engine, Metacrawler and Yahoo!Directory, I think I will prefer to use Google because the topic I am researching on is a familiar topic. I am also more familiar with Google as I have been using this search engine for a long time.

I feel that the Meta search engine I used, Metacrawler, have a lot of limitations although it searches results from many other search engines. It may not include the best search engine finds, it is quite inconsistent as there is a limit for the keyword search and the different features are not so common.

I think Google produces more relevant and useful information and just the basic search engine will do. The Google Advanced Search for me produced almost the same results and I like to keep my research focused and simple.

Adding on to the comparison, I think Yahoo! Directory is useful too. I like the simple interface which makes thing easy to understand and I like the fact that there is a Related Directory Categories tool, which help me to define my keywords and I can search more relevant pages. However, the information found is not very focused as Google. I still prefer Google among these three search engines. J

The important thing is, I discovered an advanced way of furthering my search and also the existence of meta search engines. I think they will be useful to me in my future researching. In future, if I feel like I have ran out of ways to search my information online, I will definitely try to use these few other options. J