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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Reflections (Week 4 & 5)

Search facilities have become an indispensable tool in our daily lives.

Without search facilities, it would be inconvenient to do our research and to gather information in the shortest time possible.

In EIR, i have learnt about three types of search facilities, such as search engines, meta search engines and subject directories.

Out of these three search facilities, search engines are most commonly used.

Search engines are user friendly and we can construct our search terms by using boolean operators so that the results will be more relevant.

An example of a search engine would be: Google.com.

The benefits of using search engines is that it allows me to gain access to various categories of resources, for example, among the search results there will be forums, blogs, news sites, etc.

This is definitely useful as i will be able to benefit from the diversity of views regarding my topic that i can gather by accessing these resources. This not only helps to gives me a balanced view regarding my topic, it also helps to train me to think from different perspectives by understanding the different points of views made by different people.

Apart from that, i will also be able to benefit from the large database that search engines has. A large database increases the likelihood of getting relevant results.

The next search facility would be meta search engines.

Meta search engines are also known as multisearch engines as searches can be conducted at the same time on a number of search engines.

An example of a meta search engine would be: Mamma.com

The benefits of using meta search engines is that it indexes the resources comprehensively, thus, the results might be more relevant and useful.

Also, since search terms are transmitted to several search engines at the same time, it provides quick access to the resources of different search engines by typing through the search box and this brings me the convenience of not having to go into the individual search engines to search for resources relating to my topic. This also allows me to compare results from different search engines at once.

Another search facility that i have learnt would be the subject directory.

Subject directories consist of resources that are human-compiled and are arranged in a hierarchical way.

As such, resources are well-organised in a way that users can select and browse different categories of resources and access the links in the particular category that is relevant.

An example of a subject directory would be : Yahoo! Directory.

The benefits of using a subject directory is that it is human-compiled, the resources are more relevant and precise since humans are able to analyze the relevance and important of the resource before including it in the categories. This helps to filter out irrelevant information from the resources.

Not only that, since the topics are well-organised from general areas to more specific areas, it allows for effective browsing as well.

In general, different search facilities bring about different benefits as they are useful in their own way.

However, the use of search facilities to search for resources related to my topic definitely did help in bringing me convenience as i do not have to go to the library to research for resources.

Besides that, i can also get resources in the fastest time possible by using search facilities and this helps to saves time.

Apart from the different search facilities, i have also learnt how to use site feeds in blogs.

Site feeds are also known as web feeds, and it consists of frequently updated content published by a certain website. It is commonly used for news and blogs and it allows users to track updates on the website.

I feel that site feeds are useful as i can view updated content of websites through site feeds. This helps to reduce the time and effort to check a particular website for the latest updates.

Besides that, it is also easier to view updates through site feeds because there will not be any website layout when viewing through the site feed. This makes things easier because certain websites have messy website layouts and it makes the content of the website difficult to read.

So, would i use site feeds in the future?

Definitely yes. Site feeds provides me with so much convenience, it would be a waste if i do not apply what i have learnt. :)

Success in EIR! ;