P.S. the spider is a black widow and Pon (boyfriend) is the yellow one, with Zi (girlfriend) is the blue one, so go find out what happens when a black widow bites you. I'll tell you what happens if you don't know at the end of this post.
Alright back to topic, recent UIR session had been a fruitful one. We had to go through a lab exercise pertaining to search engines, meta search engines, and subject directory search engine.
Learnt about how BOOLEAN Operators like AND & OR can be applied to search engines in order to lessen the number of search results returned, and reduce the amount of unnecessary crap that will appear on the search results list. So, we were told to try out the different search engines, searching with keywords from our topics. So, for my case, it was terrorism, world, and economy.
Search engines, the usual ones, returned me a list of 2,160,000 results, from Google.com, whereas meta search engine, MetaCrawler, returned me significantly lesser results, a total of 76.
On the contrary, subject directory search engines, which I used Yahoo for mine, returned me a list of 723 results. Each has their own advantages I suppose.
Well, a difference between these 3 search engines would be the number of results returned. Significantly, the usual search engines return the most results, whereas the other 2 returns a greatly shortened list of results. Another would be the relevance of the results, subject directory and meta searches return results with more relevance to the keywords entered in than usual search engines does.
Pertaining to search capabilities, the usual search engines often return results that are irrelevant, hence being one of its weakness, and the subject directory on the contrary gives very relevant results. Meta search engines reduces the number of results returned and provides users with the ease of browsing, without having to look through the whole list of results returned from usual search engines.
Out of these 3, which one suits you best? Well, personally I feel that I'm more accustomed to the usual search engines, despite its flaws, it still provides me with information I need, and sometimes, you may get some results you didn't expect to even see of.
Well so that marks the end of my current entry. Till then!
P.S. A black widow's bite is fatal, if you do not know what fatal means, go check it up on dictionary.com