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September 12, 2007

Searching the Deep Web



For the today's exercises, we searched "timber industry California" using a bunch of different search engines. Listed below is a description of the results/information I found on each of the sites:


  • Google: Some highlights of the Google interface are the local business map that pops up at the top of the site, the relevance of the sites, and the speed at which the results are given. One downfall of Google is the 1,980,000 results that were given. Overall, this site was very useful and gave sufficient information of the topic.
  • Yahoo Directory: This site provides a list of directories that Yahoo found relevant for the search. The directories provide a wealth of information about the topic and help narrow down the information into sub-topics. I also like how the directory site gives the homepages to the site that it found relevant, so you have the ability to search the entire site and zero in on what you are looking for. Yahoo Directories yielded 144 results.
  • Yahoo Web: I am going to start off with something that I do not like because it was the first thing that popped into my field of vision when I conducted the search. The top listed sites are the sponsored site. They are based on relevance, just that fact that these sites pay to advertise. Other than that, Yahoo was pretty good yeilding 2,940,000 results in .43 seconds (slower than Google, but still fast).
  • Scirus: This site is very good because of the quality of the results it retrieves. All the sites are from scholarly site (.edu, .org). I also like how at the top, the results are broken down into journals and other websites so it is easier to determine what you are looking at. Scirus yielded 106,066 results with 874 being from journals. I really like this site for these reasons.
  • Google Scholars: With a interface similar to that of the regular Google, this site is very easy to manage. This search yielded 27,500 results. While this is still a significant amount of results, the quality of the hits was impressive. All of the articles came from scholarly sources (journals, magazines, etc.). Another feature that I like was the Recent Articles feature. This allowed me to sort the hits by date instead of relevance.
  • UM Library Search Tools: After trying to access the Power Search function for about 10 minutes, I was still unable to combine databases to perform a broad search. Because of the difficulty that I had using this site, I will not likely access it again.
  • Complete Planet: I was displeased with this site. The number of hits and quality of the hits was pathetic. Through the search, Complete Planet yielded 13 results. Some of the top hits were Helicopter Association International and California Heritage Digital Image Finding Aids. I do not think these would be useful and for this reason, I will not likely return to this site again.


    This concludes the exercise for today involving the Deep Web. While most of these tools were very helpful, some of the later ones did not perform very well.

    Posted by adamcole at September 12, 2007 10:48 AM

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