Reflection for Day 3 Part 1

Well, after some serious work yesterday. I realized that many are looking quite dead maybe due to long hours of lessons. Nevertheless, we still have to gather our energy and go on. Today we continue to try out other types of search facilities such as Meta Search Engine and Subject Directory.

This is my first time using Meta Search Engine. It looks quite similar from regular search engine like Google. However it does not have it own database which Google has. That is why a Meta Search Engine will pull information from many other search engines. However I am amaze that even though it is searching from a few other main search engines, the results that are being generated are considered as low. I actually thought that I will be getting tons of result and I am wrong. I had used Yahoo Directory in the past, however I think that www.galaxy.com is a much better subject directory as compare to Yahoo Directory as it has more relevant results that I need. It is especially useful if you are searching on a specific topic since the results under that particular topic is already being narrow now.

All in all, to do an intensive research we must use all the different types of search facilities to help me gather our materials for the reports. We cannot just depend on one single search engine and expect our reports to be complete. Using a few search facilities will also allow comparing of the result of the search. It is just like studying, we cannot always refer to our textbook that we buy from school. Instead we must also source for extra notes from other books. No single book in the world can cover everything that you need.

In this case for my search topic, I find that subject directory is much more relevant to what I am search on. Some other topics might not be able to get any results from using subject directory. However I think that more general search facilities such as Google will be able to handle most of the research topic. Even then a subject directory is not enough as it mainly contain only reports. More articles can be found using Meta Search Engine and Google Search. I feel that our report needs to be all-rounded. A all-rounded report will consist of gathering information from reports, articles, forums and even news websites.

I think that site feeds are very useful as it keep us update to the changes in what we had subscribed to. Therefore we don't have to keep going to that blog or website to look for update which is a waste of time of there isn't any update being made. It is especially useful for people that are very busy. I am wondering if site feed can replace links since both site feed include link as well.