Searching the Web
This section deals with the many ways you can vary/define your search in order to achieve the best possible results that are most relevant to your requirements.
After being a Yahoo! fan for many years, I switched to Google a few years ago. I found that Google yielded more meaningful results for my “basic” search queries. After reading the course notes and relevant links, I have discovered that there are multiple ways to search for the same query.
In order to try a bit of variety , I have also now downloaded approx 10 search engines including Bing, Copernic, and Ask.
Copernic is a different type of search engine. It is capable of searching and producing results from multiple search engines.
1) Using Google, I tried a search using the words Curtin University Gecko. My results were as follows:
- Search as above: 4070 results (including the species).
- Search Curtin University AND Gecko: 4060 results (also including the species).
- Advanced search narrowing search to .edu domains produced only: 126 results.
- Lastly – using Google Scholar : 160 results.
2) Searching the words Curtin University Gecko using Copernic produced the following results:
- Search as above: 38 results with library.curtin.edu.au being only the 4th most relevant
- Search Curtin university AND Gecko : 49 results
- Advanced search narrowing search to .edu domains: search was not possible with Copernic Basic.
- Searching using multiple Boolean operators; ie: Curtin AND university AND gecko produced 37 results.
The first 2 or 3 results in Copernic were sponsors sites. However, on revisiting the search results, the sponsor’s sites had been removed leaving only 36 results) . This left only the most relevant sites.
Based on the above, I would feel more comfortable using Copernic search for more research related topics
