Module 4 - Search Engine Task

1. Choose your most commonly used internet search engine and do a search with words of your choosing.
record the first hit and number of hits in your learning log

My search engine of choice is always google.com.au - i have this set as my home page!

I searched for "evaluating websites" and got "about 160,000" hits.

The first website listed was:

Evaluating Web Sites
The User Context: The most important factor when evaluating Web sites is your search, your needs. What are you using the Web for? Entertainment? ...

2. Using copernicus or similar, set it up to search at least three search engines (including one that will search the 'deep web') and repeat eactly the same search

• record the number of hits in your learning log, and compare to your first search. What differences did you notice? Why? Which search, on first glance gave you the most promising results?

When using copernic agent the number of results was much less significant - getting 32 results. On first glance it looked like the google search was better as copernic gave me a lot of sponser links that were not at all related to what i was looking for, however once the sponser links dissappeared the results left all looked like they had potential - mainly being .edu sites.

I think the reason that there are less results is that copernic agent does a more concise search, and although it is using more search engines (14) it seemed to all be the sort of information i was looking for.

3. save at least the first 5 hits of both searches.

Google top 5 results:
1. Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria and Tools
2. Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria for the Classroom
3. Evaluating Web Sites
4. Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply and Questions to Ask
5. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: or, Why It's a Good Idea to Evaluate Web Sources


Copernic top 5 results:
1. Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply and Questions to Ask
2. Evaluating Web Sites
3. Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria and Tools
4. Evaluating Web Sites
5. Evaluating Website Content