PRISCILLA
19
DIP in ITO


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May 2008

For this practical session, 4 & 5 I am going to identify the different types of Internet search facilities and evaluate the effectiveness of the different Internet search facilities.

Firstly, based on my research topic, I must choose the relevant keywords. I have chosen impact, Integrated Resort and Singapore's Tourism Industry as my keywords. With these keywords, I have come up with keyword variations. For impact, I have influence, effect and repercussion. For Integrated Resort, I do not have any keyword variations. As for Singapore's Tourism Industry, I have Singapore's Tourism Market as my variations. With all the keywords variations, I have implemented a search phrases to search through the 3 search facilities. The search phrase would be (impact OR influence OR effect OR repercussion) AND Integrated Resort AND (Singapore's Tourism Industry OR Singapore's Tourism Market.

The 3 search facilities are mainly the Search Engine, Meta Search Engine and lastly subject directory. The 3 search facilities I have used would be as follow
Search Engine: http://www.yahoo.com/
Meta Search Engine: http://metacrawler.com/
Subject Directory: http://sg.search.yahoo.com/dir

Among the 3 search facilities, Yahoo Search Engine has the most hits as compared to Meta Crawler and Yahoo Subject Directory. Meta Crawler was ranked the 2nd for the number of hits followed by Yahoo Subject Directory. Even though the search hits by Yahoo Search Engine was as high as 324oo hits, but this search does not took a long time, it only took 0.49 seconds. Although Meta Crawler has narrowed down the search hits to only 44, there was no relevant source which is relevant to my topic. As for Yahoo Subject Directory, there was no search results found.

Therefore, I can conclude that Yahoo Search Engine is the best search facility for the time being for my research topic. Yahoo search engines provides me with many different sites which thus giving me an opportunity to choose the best site which is appropriate to my research topic. As compared to Meta Crawler, although they provides me with less search results which in return save my time on going through all the sites, the search results provided were rather irrelevant to my research topic. Nevertheless, I must say that each search facility have their own strengths and weakness. Each search facility provides relevant or irrelevant information is based on the keywords the users had typed.