Organising search information

Seeing as its been so long I feel a bit out of shape in these tasks, and Im trying to follow on with a task I completed over a month ago. But ive quickly gone through it all again, and Im a little unsure of the requirements of this task, but in my search only 1 result was completely relevant so due to this I will only include this. Seeing as my search was done with a simple web based search, google, I felt the easiest way to retrieve the particular information asked for was just a simple cut and paste.

The URL is : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Meal

The Author is : seeing as its a wikipedia page the author is not listed

Institution : Wikipedia

Blurb : 14 Aug 2008 ... A toy is typically included with the food, both of which are usually ... The Stolz meal featured the first McDonald's in-meal premiums, ...

Its been a while

Well its been over a month since I last posted, didnt think it was that long :S I thought id better finish this blog off. Ive been too tied up with all these other assignments I had to submit and other personal issues. Not that anyone cares :P Im back now anywayz. :D

Boolean Searching

With most searches the easiest way to get the most hits is to just type each keyword in separated by spaces. This searches for every website with 1 or more of these keywords and orders them from sites with all 3 keywords to sites with 1 keyword, (sites with the most common keyword being listed last). If I were to use a boolean search and add an & in between each keyword I'll only only be shown pages containing all 3 words and nothing else. If I wanted to be more specific I could put the keywords in quotation marks ("") to search for sites containing that exact string of letters in that order which will further minimize the results shown. If I was to only look for pages relating to my search that only came from university sources, I could either add University as another keyword, or I could restrict my search to domains of only .edu . But I feel a simple broader search should be performed first as in a lot of cases the information you desire will be relatively easy to find. If at first you can't find it then I suggest moving onto more in depth searching techniques. In my search for "First Mcdonalds Toy", I used no boolean and my search generated many results as it was very broad (how many sites contain the words First, Mcdonalds or Toy?). However the first result of my google search gave me exactly what I desired to find out and thus I didn't feel the need to take the searching to the next level.

Pagesucker feels left out

I felt amidst all this searching I better put aside the time to show pagesucker some respect that it doesn't deserve. This program is bad, it says its free but everytime it starts up it asks you to register. And thats a waste of a few good clicks of my time. Upon first glance I couldn't straight away figure out what was going on, thus I felt it was not user friendly. It does do what it needs to, but I feel that its much easier to just click File, Save As. It does not increase efficiency at all, if anything it slows me down. And until now I hadn't heard anything about the program so I'm under the assumption that its not very popular or common. Due to its poor nature, I shall not discuss the program anymore and resume normal searching entertainment

Search of my choosing

For the search of my choosing I decided to search for something obscure, namely "the first Mcdonalds toy". The results in Copernic were appalling. Giving pages on where I can buy them, or purchase the Mcdonalds characters as plush toys. The number of pages found was significantly lower then that of googles, but googles first results were more related to the search I was doing, with the Wikipedia page on Happy Meals containing the exact information I desired. This could be possibly due to Copernic being the free version and maybe they have to include advertising pages as the first results.


heres the first 5 results using Copernic




And the first 5 from google

Meta Data, Meta Searching, I want to Meta Myself

After all the bad mouthing of Meta Searching using Copernic, I do admit that Meta Searching can be more user friendly where in some cases there are tidy boxes that ask you what to include and what not to include in your searches etc. This feature is useful as it means you don't have to type out Boolean searches eg. Supermodel && Carmen Electra. And limiting to certain domain types is another feature I was unfamiliar with and never actually thought of when searching, which is particularly useful when searching for University websites (.edu) or government (.gov). This feature I was impressed with. And in future in those particular circumstances I might turn to Meta Searching, but at this point in time for most of my general searching needs, A refined google search does the trick.

Sppppecccial

Another form of search engines we discussed were Specialized Databases. I'm a fan of these. If there's particular information I desire and I know the Specialized database for it I'm there. IMDB is great for when I'm looking for anything Movie or Actor related. I use torrent databases such as Mininova.org or Isohunt.com for my torrent searches. And I use Packetnews.com for my IRC searching. These are just a few examples and really beats trying to weed out the garbage that google throws at ya when your searching for a particular torrent or what not. And all the information is there for ya ordered nicely and in well laid out pages.