Digitalportfolioronf.weebly.com



Web Search ExerciseIn today’s digital age, the notion that access to a seemingly unlimited amount of information via the internet’s search engines is very prevalent. However, there is much more to the concept of “surfing the web” than is often apparent. Very often the general search engines such as Yahoo! and Google provide results that are not relevant to what the searcher is looking for. For this exercise I have chosen to examine how the Indian Ringneck Parakeet is considered to be a pest bird in both their native habitat and in places where they do not naturally occur but have managed to establish stable feral populations. For the three web search engines I have chosen to use , , and . My meta search engine of choice is . The first search engine I explored was I first wanted to see what would happen if I used the regular search bar without delving into the Advanced Search option. I typed in “Indian Ringneck Parakeet AND crops AND pest AND wine AND grapes NOT parrot” (no quotes) into the search bar and submitted it. I used the Boolean operator “NOT” to exclude any pages with the term “parrot” on it as the bird is a type of parrot and it resulted in over 49 million hits. My search proved disappointing as I only received three total hits, and of the three hits only one was relevant to my topic. The relevant hit was archived news from which has an article explaining the threat escaped Indian Ringneck Parakeets pose to Australian food crops. It also has a reminder to pet owners to be extra vigilant and to take active precautions to prevent their pet bird from escaping. Another of the three results is from a California Fish and Game internet archive, but it talks about a different species of bird known as a “shell parakeet” (commonly called a budgie or budgerigar). The third result appears to be some type of advertisement website, and its appearance prevented me from clicking on it out of fear of getting hit with spyware. I decided to alter my search to bring forth more relevant results. I removed “wine” and “grapes” and searched for “Indian Ringneck Parakeet AND crops AND pest NOT parrot” (no quotes). This produced exactly 30 hits. The very first result was from the Australia Department of Agriculture and Food. It is a PDF file that discusses what the parakeet is, the risk that feral populations pose to food crops and to trees, their negative impact on native bird species, and ways people can prevent their escape from their cages. The next few results are also relevant to my topic, with the exception of one page that has to do with someone’s pet Indian Ringneck Parakeet. After this, there is a mixture of related and unrelated results. There is even a Wikipedia article on what a “feral animal” is. After this first page of results, the remainders are not really related to my topic. After examining the results of the regular search, I then shifted focus to the Advanced Search option that Yahoo offers. This allows you to break down your search results by domain (.com, .org, etc), language, country, file format, the number of results per page, and whether or not you wish to have the safe search on or off. But, the “Show Results Within” section is what I wanted to test the most as it gives you the option to narrow your search in the same way typing in the Boolean operators does. You have the option to search “all of these words”, “the exact phrase”, “any of these words”, and “none of these words.” For each of these you can indicate if the search terms can appear in any part of the page or if they must be in the title of the page. I typed “Indian Ringneck Parakeet crops pest” (no quotes) into the “all of these words” section, and I typed “parrot” in the “none of these words” section. I then hit submit, and the results were the exact same 30 I had received when I typed the words using the Boolean operators into the normal search bar on the Yahoo search home page. This confirmed my belief that this section of Yahoo’s advanced search is the same as using Boolean operators, and I suspect Yahoo may have included it for those who may not know about (or how to properly use) Boolean operators. The next search engine I used to test my Boolean operator search was . I again typed “Indian Ringneck Parakeet AND crops AND pest AND wine AND grapes NOT parrot” and the same three results that Yahoo had given me appeared. I again removed “wine” and “grapes”, and “Indian Ringneck Parakeet AND crops AND pest NOT parrot” again displayed exactly 30 hits. Even more interesting was that most of them were the same 30 results I had gotten from Yahoo. My browser remembered the links I had clicked on in Yahoo, as they were highlighted in the purple coloration used to identify them from links not previously visited. This came as somewhat of a surprise to me, as in times past my casual searches have had more difference in the results depending on which search engine I used. Because the results were very similar, I shifted my focus to exploring Bing’s advanced search options. Unlike Yahoo’s advanced search, I noticed straight away that you do not have the option to write in everything you wish to include and exclude at the same time. It is a dropdown box format. For example, after typing in my “Indian Ringneck Parakeet AND crops AND pest NOT parrot” line, I wanted to include the word “bird” using the advanced options. I selected “all of these terms” and typed bird into the box. I then submitted this, and I noticed in my search bar it added “bird” after the “NOT parrot” at the end. This lowered the results from 30 to 24 hits, and it replaced some of the sites that had been the result from the first. The initial page remained relatively unchanged and still contained the same relevant results I had from before. But I noticed a large change in the second page, which now contained sites that appeared to be very sexually explicit in nature. What Bing’s advanced search options share with Yahoo’s are the options to search by domain, country/region, and language. I then wanted to see how the “any of these terms” option would affect the results. I hit that drop down box and typed in “bird feather flying” (no quotes) and submitted it. The results changed somewhat, although still contained largely the same results from my initial search. I did note that it automatically added parenthesis around the three new terms, and included “OR” in between them, so that my new search line was “Indian Ringneck Parakeet AND crops AND pest NOT parrot (bird OR feather OR flying).” This indicates without a doubt that Bing’s advanced search utilizes Boolean operators to function. The downside to this is that it did little to improve the results of the search query, and of the results that were related there was nothing that I had not already seen before. The third regular search engine I decided to use was . I again typed in Indian Ringneck Parakeet AND crops AND pest AND wine AND grapes NOT parrot which had the same effect of producing many results dealing with the birds as pets, and other unrelated links. “Indian Ringneck Parakeet AND crops AND pest NOT parrot” with this search engine, resulted in a total of five hits, and all five I had previously seen on both of the other search engines, indicating a 100% overlap with this particular search query. Just like Bing and Yahoo, the first result was the one from the Australian Department of Agriculture page. But unlike the other engines, next to this result (and only this result) was a small link that said “more results.” Clicking this brought me to a page with 6 results, all from the Australian Department of Agriculture’s site. All of these hits were related and the infamous PDF file from the very first result was again present. Due to the small amount of hits from this search engine, I decided to test if changing “NOT parrot” to “OR parrot” would increase the amount of related results. I typed (Indian Ringneck Parakeet OR Parrot) AND crops AND pest. Unfortunately, with the inclusion of “parrot” an extreme decline in the quality of the hits was the result. Many results regarding different parrot or bird species, pest insects, and the damage of pest control chemicals on the environment were prevalent. Something interesting on is the little drop down arrow beside the search logo on the main search page. Clicking this brings down a drop down box, and gives you the option to search with other search engines. You can “try search on” Amazon, Google and Bing’s image search, Wikipedia, Youtube, and more. Selecting one of these options and submitting your query redirects you to your selected search engine’s results page. There are commands that they call “!bangs” or the “bang! syntax” which can be typed into the search bar instead of clicking on the drop down box to search using the desired alternative search engine. In the Support Center section regarding !bangs, it states “suppose you wanted to search for 'bags'. In that case, you could just enter '!a bags' into DuckDuckGo and we'll take you right to the correct search results page on . The “What is Duckduckgo” section explains it “is a general purpose search engine that is intended to be your starting place when searching the Internet. Use it to get?way more instant answers, way less spam and?real privacy.” This search engine, as opposed to the others, has a more personal feeling to it as opposed to the corporate feeling Yahoo and Bing resonate. My choice for the meta search engine was . Dogpile uses Yahoo, Google, and Bing’s search engines. Dogpile’s “Advanced Search” option resembles Yahoo’s “Show Results Within” option in that it is a four part setup that allows the user to specify “all of these words”, “the exact phrase”, “any of these words”, and “none of these words” at the same time as opposed to Bing’s in which the user has to specify one of these four categories, submit the search, and then if he or she wishes to use another of the categories it has to be typed in and resubmitted. Typing “Indian Ringneck Parakeet AND crops AND pest NOT parrot” into the standard search bar yielded 130 total hits (13 pages with 10 on each page). I noticed straight away that the very first result was not what I was looking for – it was a care sheet for feeding pet Indian Ringnecks. The second result was the same Australian Department of Agriculture link that came up in the three normal search engines (although in those it was the first result). Another of the links on the first page is a care sheet for the bird, and the only real relation to my specific topic is that it does mention where in the world the birds have established feral populations (but does not mention anything about them being pests to agriculture or the environment). The next few results are overlaps from the other search engines. The last result on the first page is also a care sheet, but it does mention the fact that the birds are agricultural pests. The second hit from page two of Dogpile’s results is also related. It is an article written to National Geographic news and it explains the negative impacts of the birds in the United Kingdom. Pages three to ten of the results contained a few related hits among the rest of the mostly unrelated ones. Beyond page ten, no other articles on my topic appeared. For the search engines I used, I examined the support/help centers of each in order to examine how each one’s advanced search option worked. I was particularly interested in seeing if they mention a certain Boolean operator being the “default.” On Duckduckgo’s page, under the “Group Search Terms” section, it states “Every search term should be used by default. That is, we try hard not to autocorrect your query, or in other words, we treat your terms as if you typed AND in between them.” It would appear from this wording that “AND” is used by default. Bing’s “Search Effectively” article under the help section states “You don't have to type the word AND between your search words. By default, all searches are AND searches.” Yahoo’s “Tips for Using Yahoo! Search Effectively” does not mention anything about the AND Boolean operator as being the “default.” Interestingly, when I examined Dogpile’s “FAQs” and “About Dogpile” sections, neither mention Boolean operators or their use in the way the three normal search engine’s help sections did. If I was not already aware of what Boolean operators are and how they work, I would have to use the “Advanced Search” function exclusively. Despite not including any information about Boolean operators, they still worked in Dogpile. Something that I also found interesting about Yahoo and Duckduckgo is that they support and encourage using a minus (–) sign in the same way one would use the Boolean Operator “NOT.” Yahoo also encourages the use of the plus (+) sign for the Boolean operator “AND”, however Duckduckgo lists that “AND” should be used with no mention of the plus sign. Bing states that the Boolean operators should be used and explains how to use them, and makes no mention of plus or minus signs. All the search engines, regardless of whether or not they use the plus and minus signs, supported the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT as evidenced by their use having the desired effects on my search results. Of the three regular search engines I have explored for this exercise, I would recommend Yahoo as being my search engine of choice and the one I would recommend to others as well. Yahoo has the feel of being the most user friendly of the three. Its advanced search options are the most customizable and a user has the choice of using Boolean operators, the advanced options, or the plus and minus signs to include or exclude certain terms from their inquiry. I did find Duckduckgo’s simplistic design and clutter free nature attractive, however receiving only five hits as compared to the thirty from Yahoo turned me off somewhat. Even though narrowing the search results to be more relevant to what you are looking for is often the desired effect, five results are a bit too narrow for my taste. Bing’s advanced options were not as extensive as Yahoo’s. The meta search engine Dogpile still produced a number of unrelated results, including the very first hit, even though I used the same search inquiry as the others. I personally do not view a meta search engine as the best option for one who seeks to narrow their results; although it could be beneficial to one who seeks to expand it due to the way it uses several search engines simultaneously. Yahoo did not give me the impression of having too much or too few results, and combined with its extensive advanced search options and support of Boolean operators make it my search engine of choice. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download