Jan's Working with the Web

Exercise Web 1-5:  Search

Purpose: to compare how various search services work

1. Searching for? What you are going to looking for exactly? You must define what a page must have to count it as a successful hit. For example, should it contain a copy of the Constitution of the United States of America, or the budget for the United Nations, or information on the Heartbleed security bug? Feel free to choose something that you really do need to find out, perhaps for another class.
   
2. Phrase: Select a phrase of at least 2 keywords related to your search goal. Do not count words like a, an, the, but, and … which are ignored by the search programs.
   For example, United States Constitution or United Nations budget or Heartbleed bug. Do not use upper case letters unless you really are looking for a proper name.
   
3. Search services: Choose 3 search services and 1 metasearch site. You may use the links on the My Home or links in the lesson earlier, if you wish.
   
4. Features: List the special features that each of the search services offers such as searching only pages in a certain language or containing images or newer than last month or for people and company names. Do any of these features look especially helpful for your search? If so, include a search using the feature and also one without using it to see if it really does help you find pages that are more what you want.
   

5. Results Table: Make a table similar to the example below to record your results. You can use a Word table or Excel.

   Include the name of the search service and its URL and any special features used, what word(s) were used for the search, the total number of pages found in each search, and any good matches in the first 25 results.

   If there were no exact matches, write in the last column your evaluation of how close to a match the first 25 results were.

   You should have at least 3 search services and 1 metasearch site with 5 searches in each, similar to the example.

   Note in your chart if you restricted the search in some way using one of the special features of the search engine. A true search engine will not have categories or a directory, but most major sites are combinations these days.

   Search results for Jerusalem virus,

   This virus is an old (1987+) computer virus. It activates on Friday 13th and deletes any programs that are run on that day. Not friendly!
   [table statistics below from May 12, 2014]

   Searching for info on the Jerusalem computer virus
   Search service	Word(s) / Phrase	Categories found	Pages in directory found	Pages on the Web found	Successful?
   Yahoo http://yahoo.com for web pages http://dmoz.com/ for categories	Jerusalem	10 top level	514	30,600,000	None in first 3 pages
   	virus	13 top level	822	124,000,000	Several pages to sites about computer viruses which probably have info. Good places to start.
   	virus Jerusalem	0	0	837,000	Several successes on first page.
   	jerusalem virus	0	0	833,000	Several successes on first page.
   	+jerusalem +virus	0	0	752,000	Several successes on first page.
   	"jerusalem virus"	0	0	5410	Nearly all on the first page

6. Save your table to the web project1 folder on your Class disk as ex1-5-Lastname-Firstname.docx if you used Word or as ex1-5-Lastname-Firstname.xlsx if you used Excel.
7. Analysis: Write a brief evaluation of the services you used in a Word document. Which would you recommend and why. How well did each service do? Which found the most pages? Which found the most relevant pages? Which search words found the most relevant pages? What features of a web page did each search engine treat as most important?
8. Save your evaluation as ex1-5-evaluation-Lastname-Firstname.docx to the web project1 folder of your Class disk.
9. Print both of the documents you created for this exercise.