At the end of the rope with Web Searching… The First Knot

The countdown to the closing of Week 2 is on the fire yet the journey feels like it just started. The web searching assignment has opened more doors than The Castle of Versailles’ and Burj Khalifa combined.

To answer the riddle “Which Search Engine is best?” one should knock on many doors to collect a piece of puzzle to recognize the ‘abstract’ picture. My Marathon continues not to answer the question above but to optimize my web searching skills.

I am currently swinging between Google and iSEEK (education) for efficient search especially for academic purposes. I’ve been using Google since it was still labeled “Beta” and been satisfied with it. Some of their continuous R&D is visible to the user and others are in the shadow; but effects of both are facilitating the web searching experience even for the non-experienced user. I’ve just been introduced to iSEEK and find a good alternative to Google when it comes to focused queries. I took some time testing iSEEK (education) and playing around with it to get familiar with their interesting tools. I particularly liked the ‘visual’ filters and classifications of entries. They even state the number of entries next to each filter. Even when you don’t know what information you are looking for within a certain primitive query subject, the filters suggest some nice focuses to check.

I believe that the overwhelming amount of information on the WWW makes it next to impossible to dig what you need without some really powerful tools. I wonder if the search engines are ahead on the race for helping us to find the information we need and put it at our disposal when the number of pages on the WWW is growing at an astronomical rate. Today, there are at least 7.41 billion pages indexed pages! (worldwidewebsize) I am not surprised to see why Google is on top of everyone’s list for search engines when it has the highest number of indexed web pages among other leading engines.

Saying that, I think that the query and the degree of credibility combined are keys to successful web searching. First, one should learn good techniques on how to formulate the query. The query consists of key word(s). The choice of these words can make a major difference for the results of a certain engine. Trying out synonyms sometimes is crucial; same for the order of those words. The use of filters provided by the search engine can help narrow the entries and focus on your needs and save you time looking at irrelevant pages. Filters can also help you focusing results to higher degrees of credibility. The trick is not about how to use these filters but also how to determine the credibility of the entry. That is another story since the success of a web search cannot be measure solely by the number of links but the quality of the information they hide behind.

I raised the issue of credibility on Nicenet answering a question by Yuliya and I am still waiting the feedback of my colleagues including Jodi and Sheri. Hopefully, we can reasonably solve this problem within this course.