Unit 8

About.com

 

 

 

 

About.com is a subject directorer that is full of information. Here are five thing I have learned in searching About.com

 

 

1. About.com has "Guide's" for particular sites. On the left cornor of the site there is a name and by clicking that it will give you the "Guide's" E-mail adderess so you can contact them with questions, where they got their sources, and ect. Furthermore, after clicking on them is gives you a short synopsis of the editor so you can see how creditable they are.

 

2. About.com has many different ways in finding information. On the top of the page you can ether pick Editors' Picks, Explore Topics, and Browse Categories. This gives gives you different ways of searching the web site.

 

3. While using Boolean search tools I saw that About.com is fair at differencing the terms but I think it could have been done better.

 

4. After typing in your search term you can scroll to the bottom of the page and look at related searchs for added fields from Google custom search. this is useful for cases where About.com does not have good sources for your subject material.

5. Another beneficial thing I found while searching About.com is the RSS tool. Having this can help search material come to you instead of always having to look for in at About.com. While this is useful in the long run its not always the best when crunched for time.

All in all I liked About.com and will probable use it in the future. It was really hard for me to find search tips on the help page so I just had to find most of the information by just exerimanting with the search browser. If I missed anything major please let me know.

Dogpile.com

 

Dogpile.com is a metasearh which implies it searchs more then one search engine. Dogpile.com uses Google, Yahoo, and Yandex for its search engines.

 

1. While on the home page you can click advanced search which opens up a box that allows you to type in words that you want to search for and word that you do not want in your search field. In addition, you can include or exclude a domain.

 

2. The preferences page is a positive part in changing your different search setting allowing you to filter, see blod search terms, track recent searchs, and search by location.

 

3. While at the home page you can click on about Dogpile on the bottom of the page. Then on your left hand corner click on metasearch 101. After reading the paragraph on metasearch you can click on Dogpile tricks of the trade. This will give you pointers on search terms and other Boolean related material.

 

4. When searching for a images you can click on the images tap and go to advanced search to filter for specific image color, size, or file format.

 

5.  Audio and Video searches can be filtered for playtime or file format. And news searches can be filtered by news category, location, date or source.

 

 

Bing.com

 

Bing.com is a search engine. Bing to me seems very flashy and gimicky.

 

1. Bing is very good with Boolean search terms which is good for a narrow search leading to key subject material.

 

2. A interseting way Bing has taught me to search is through images. By finding images related to your context you can simply click on one of the images and it will bring you to the web page.

 

3. While searching Bing i found out you can take a screen shot of a nice car off a show that you don't know the make or model and you can post it on a discussion page or a shopping site and let people help with your search at hand.

 

4. Searching for people on the internet is not always the easiest thing to do. However, Bing uses white pages while searching. this inturn, helps you in your searching needs.

 

5. On the Bing hompage you can click the setting button and go to wideweb. This feature allows you to search for subject material in different country/region.