Web Search Engines and Me"My adventures in web weaving and surfing the 'net"
Introduction
This report documents my experiences with different Web Search Engines, consisting of three parts: 1) Data collection- all my written data such as what I searched for and my reactions, 2) Prior Generational Reports- my reactions to reports written by previous generations on Web Search Engines, and 3) A summary of my experience and advice for future generations.
Instructions for Reports G7, 409b, Fall 1997
Table of Contents
Data Collection
"How many hits did you say it brought back?!?"
Search One
1- Day, date, location
November 17, 1997 POST Computer Labs
2- My mood or affective state
feeling happy, stress free
3- Name of search engine and # of times I've used it before and whether I like it or not and why.
Altavista. Countless times. I like it because it brings back the most relevant searches for me. I think because it's the tried and true one, I don't bother to use any others.
4- Search statement I typed in and why I chose those particular words, whether it contained Boolean operators, why not or why yes.
search statement was "final fantasy 7" chose these words because I'm looking for hints and walkthroughs for this particular game. didn't use Boolean terms because I didn't think they were necessary.
5- Number of expected hits or results
expected 200 hits
6- Number of hits actually gotten
actual hits: 7357796
7- My reaction to 5/6
Holy cow, this is way more than I expected. although I doubt all of these are relevant even 8 of the first ten hits weren't relevant to the game I was looking for.
8- My evaluation of the hits: what proportion were relevant and how I found this out.
Many of the first 20 hits were irrelevant, or the ones that were related to "final fantasy 7 resulted in "file not found". I clicked on the first twenty results and was disappointed. I may need to use Boolean factors.
9- How I felt about it. Did your mood influence how you searched or browsed.? Did the topic influence your search strategy? Did you make use of search engine instructions or help documents? Why?
I was really disappointed because I was hoping to find relevant information.unfortunately I was bombarded with file not founds and info on previous final fantasy games. my mood didn't influence much of how I searched. maybe it did since after the first 20 hits I gave up. my lack of patience plays an important role on how long I will keep clicking on the results that these search engines return. The topic did not influence my search strategy, and I did not use any of the instructions that Altavista provides. I figure I've used these things so often, I don't need to look up for help.
10- Give quantitative ratings of the search experience:
-1 stressful
-1 dissatisfied
-2 wasted
-1 confusing
-2 discouraging
Search Two
1- Day, date, location
November 17, 1997 POST Computer Labs
2- My mood or affective state
feeling disappointed from my once reliable search engines lack of valid results
3- Name of search engine and # of times I've used it before and whether I like it or not and why.
Excite. used it about 12 times.. not much. usually rely on Altavista so I thought I'd try it out.
4- Search statement I typed in and why I chose those particular words, whether it contained Boolean operators, why not or why yes
"final fantasy 7" I didn't think it'd be fair if I added Boolean variables since I didn't do so with Altavista.
5- Number of expected hits or results
expected: 500 (since it returned so much with Altavista I figured more...)
6- Number of hits actually gotten
actual hits: didn't say, only shows top 10 and a button for the next 10
7- My reaction to 5/6
I actually like this better, it's not important how many hits they bring back, only the relevancy.
8- My evaluation of the hits: what proportion were relevant and how I found this out.
the relevancy was really high, the percentage gauge really helped and all of the first ten links were good for me.
9- How I felt about it. Did your mood influence how you searched or browsed.? Did the topic influence your search strategy? Did you make use of search engine instructions or help documents? Why?
I really like this search engine and was impressed, they sort the results in terms of percentage relevance and even the first link was a valid link all the way to the bottom one. two thumbs up. again I didn't make use of the instructions, I just typed in the keywords I was looking for
10- Give quantitative ratings of the search experience:
+3 pleasant
+1 satisfied
+1 valuable
+2 clarifying
+2 hopeful
Search Three
1- Day, date, location
November 17, 1997 POST Computer Labs
2- My mood or affective state
feeling happy again since I found some valuable info regarding my first topic with excite search engine
3- Name of search engine and # of times I've used it before and whether I like it or not and why.
Hotbot. my second most used search engine.. too many times... usually brings back relevant stuff. has the percentage rating of excite and the large hits of Altavista.
4- Search statement I typed in and why I chose those particular words, whether it contained Boolean operators, why not or why yes
"havok mutants" havok is my favorite comic character, in the marvel universe so I thought I could find some info and some images on him. havok is probably too vague so adding the words "mutants" will probably narrow the search.
5- Number of expected hits or results
expected: 300 hits
6- Number of hits actually gotten
actual hits: 277
7-My reaction to 5/6
small size, much more tangible, hopefully all relevant hehe
8- My evaluation of the hits: what proportion were relevant and how I found this out.
a small return ratio brought back very few sites to visit.. I checked out the first 20 and only the first few were very good.
9- How I felt about it. Did your mood influence how you searched or browsed.? Did the topic influence your search strategy? Did you make use of search engine instructions or help documents? Why?
there were a lot of images that I could save to disk on the first two sites. I was happy to see that there are some pages dedicated to this character. as usual I didn't make use of the instructions that Hotbot provides
10- Give quantitative ratings of the search experience:
+2 pleasant
+1 satisfied
+1 valuable
+1 clarifying
+2 hopeful
Search Four
1- Day, date, location
November 17, 1997 POST Computer Labs
2- My mood or affective state
feeling hasty, expecting junk return because of my previous search with Altavista
3- Name of search engine and # of times I've used it before and whether I like it or not and why.
Altavista
4- Search statement I typed in and why I chose those particular words, whether it contained Boolean operators, why not or why yes
"havok mutants" same search as #3 to keep the results fair.
5- Number of expected hits or results
expected: 500 hits
6- Number of hits actually gotten
actual hits: 9215
7- My reaction to 5/6
I expected twice the amount of results that Hotbot had brought me but this amount (9215) is ridiculous! even worse, the first ten don't even seem directly related to my search.
8- My evaluation of the hits: what proportion were relevant and how I found this out.
again, most of these links were not directly related.. it was too vague. perhaps when using Altavista ill have to use Boolean factors.
9- How I felt about it. Did your mood influence how you searched or browsed.? Did the topic influence your search strategy? Did you make use of search engine instructions or help documents? Why?
disappointed again with the lack of relevancy that Altavista offered me. I think I'm going to have to switch to a better suited search engine..
10- Give quantitative ratings of the search experience:
-1 stressful
-1 dissatisfied
-1 wasted
-1 confusing
-2 discouraging
Search Five
1- Day, date, location
November 17, 1997 POST Computer Labs
2- My mood or affective state
feeling frustrated with Altavista so I will avoid this search engine for the remainder of this report
3- Name of search engine and # of times I've used it before and whether I like it or not and why.
Webcrawler. haven't used this engine in a year. thought I'd check it out and give it another whirl.
4- Search statement I typed in and why I chose those particular words, whether it contained Boolean operators, why not or why yes
"Stephanie Seymour"
5- Number of expected hits or results
expected: 700 hits
6- Number of hits actually gotten
actual hits: 5712
7- My reaction to 5/6
guess there are a lot of fans of this beautiful supermodel
8- My evaluation of the hits: what proportion were relevant and how I found this out.
I checked most of them out. Webcrawler sorts the hits by % also so yeah I checked from top to bottom.
9- How I felt about it. Did your mood influence how you searched or browsed.? Did the topic influence your search strategy? Did you make use of search engine instructions or help documents? Why?
seeing tons of images of her made me feel heheehe. I think after a while, you start visiting so many sites that the pictures and info regarding her starts to overlap. so it gets kind of boring. also these pages are loaded with images so I'm glad I'm not waiting for this to load at home. it would take forever if I was.. this one site I went to had way too many pictures that the computer and browser started freezing up.
10- Give quantitative ratings of the search experience:
+2 pleasant
+1 satisfied
+1 valuable
+2 clarifying
+2 hopeful
Search Six
1- Day, date, location
November 17, 1997 POST Computer Labs
2- My mood or affective state
feeling happy again since Webcrawler returned such great results
3- Name of search engine and # of times I've used it before and whether I like it or not and why.
Hotbot. impressed with the results it brought me in a previous search so I thought I'd give it another whirl.
4- Search statement I typed in and why I chose those particular words, whether it contained Boolean operators, why not or why yes
"Stephanie Seymour"
5- Number of expected hits or results
expected: 700 hits
6- Number of hits actually gotten
actual hits: 5581
7- My reaction to 5/6
still a lot of Steph fans but didn't pick up as much as Webcrawler did.
8- My evaluation of the hits: what proportion were relevant and how I found this out.
the results brought back some really nicely designed Stephanie Seymour related web pages.
9- How I felt about it. Did your mood influence how you searched or browsed.? Did the topic influence your search strategy? Did you make use of search engine instructions or help documents? Why?
again, I was happy to find a lot of images and info related to the supermodel.
10- Give quantitative ratings of the search experience:
+2 pleasant
+1 satisfied
+1 valuable
+2 clarifying
+2 hopeful
Search Seven
1- Day, date, location
November 30, 1997 At Home
2- My mood or affective state
feeling tired because it's been a long day (now 11PM)
3- Name of search engine and # of times I've used it before and whether I like it or not and why.
Altavista, I'm going to give it one more chance. If it brings back junk sites, I will boycott Altavista.
4- Search statement I typed in and why I chose those particular words, whether it contained Boolean operators, why not or why yes
"Jeff Bagwell"
5- Number of expected hits or results
expected: 15,000 hits
6- Number of hits actually gotten
actual hits: 14,1517
7- My reaction to 5/6
That's a lot of pages related to one of my favorite baseball players, but most of the hits probably just mention his name in a stat or something small.
8- My evaluation of the hits: what proportion were relevant and how I found this out.
This is great, who cares if it brought a million hits, the important thing is that there was one site (the third one listed) that had everything I was looking for: pictures, video clips, stats and links to other Jeff Bagwell related websites. This search was a success!
9- How I felt about it. Did your mood influence how you searched or browsed.? Did the topic influence your search strategy? Did you make use of search engine instructions or help documents? Why?
I'm glad that Altavista finally brought back results I actually cared about. The topics didn't influence my search strategy, basically I just typed in the name of the baseball player I was looking for. As usual I didn't read any tips or help documents.
10- Give quantitative ratings of the search experience:
+2 pleasant
+1 satisfied
+1 valuable
+2 clarifying
+2 hopeful
Search Eight
1- Day, date, location
November 30, 1997 At Home
2- My mood or affective state
feeling happy because I had good results with my previous search
3- Name of search engine and # of times I've used it before and whether I like it or not and why.
Infoseek. I never used this search engine often so I thought I'd give it a try.
4- Search statement I typed in and why I chose those particular words, whether it contained Boolean operators, why not or why yes
"Jeff Bagwell" No Boolean operators used because I don't think they are necessary.
5- Number of expected hits or results
expected: 10,000 hits
6- Number of hits actually gotten
actual hits: 2,308
7- My reaction to 5/6
I don't understand why there are so little hits. I guess the way Infoseek retrieves relevant hits is different from Altavista and Hotbot.
8- My evaluation of the hits: what proportion were relevant and how I found this out.
The sites that were returned wasn't what I was looking for. It only brought back sites that mentioned his name but didn't have any images or multimedia related stuff. Perhaps I should have added the word "multimedia" to find sites that were limited to "Jeff Bagwell" in that sense.
9- How I felt about it. Did your mood influence how you searched or browsed.? Did the topic influence your search strategy? Did you make use of search engine instructions or help documents? Why?
Disappointed, I'm not going to use this search engine for quite a while. It didn't bring back enough hits let alone relevant ones. I didn't use any help documents but if I did, perhaps I would have received more favorable results.
10- Give quantitative ratings of the search experience:
-1 stressful
-1 dissatisfied
-1 wasted
-1 confusing
-2 disappointed
Search Nine
1- Day, date, location
December 1, 1997 At Home
2- My mood or affective state
Full of energy but hungry. I just woke up from sleeping.
3- Name of search engine and # of times I've used it before and whether I like it or not and why.
Webcrawler. I was impressed with the results that this search engine returned on my other search so I thought I'd give it another try.
4- Search statement I typed in and why I chose those particular words, whether it contained Boolean operators, why not or why yes
"South Park" No Boolean operators used because I don't think they are necessary.
5- Number of expected hits or results
expected: 5,000 hits
6- Number of hits actually gotten
actual hits: 181,337
7- My reaction to 5/6
I know that this cartoon is popular, but there is no way that there are that many websites. I think if I use the Boolean operators it could eliminate many irrelevant hits.
8- My evaluation of the hits: what proportion were relevant and how I found this out.
All the top 25 hits that were returned were relevant. Not only that, they were excellent sites filled with info, images and sounds that I could make use of! Great results! I had trouble just visiting them all because every site returned had so much good content.
9- How I felt about it. Did your mood influence how you searched or browsed? Did the topic influence your search strategy? Did you make use of search engine instructions or help documents? Why?
Pleased to find so much info on the Web. I just typed in the name of the show, I did not have a search strategy. Again, I did not make use of the instructions or help documents.
10- Give quantitative ratings of the search experience:
+2 pleasant
+1 satisfied
+1 valuable
+2 clarifying
+2 hopeful
Search Ten
1- Day, date, location
December 1, 1997 At Home
2- My mood or affective state
Full of energy, I finished eating so I'm relaxed and full.
3- Name of search engine and # of times I've used it before and whether I like it or not and why.
Hotbot, it's my last search so I thought I'd use Hotbot one last time.
4- Search statement I typed in and why I chose those particular words, whether it contained Boolean operators, why not or why yes
"quincy tan" I didn't use any Boolean operators because Hotbot has this feature (pull down menu) where I was able to choose "search all the words"
5- Number of expected hits or results
expected: 100 hits
6- Number of hits actually gotten
actual hits: 976
7- My reaction to 5/6
I know there a few of my friends web pages that link to my page or mention my name but I didn't think there were that many. They probably aren't all relevant.
8- My evaluation of the hits: what proportion were relevant and how I found this out.
I browsed through the first 50 hits but it seems that after the first 20, none of them were related to me. In fact maybe only 10 of the first 20 mentioned my name or was relevant. One of the links that was returned was the G7 homepage! Cool.
9- How I felt about it. Did your mood influence how you searched or browsed? Did the topic influence your search strategy? Did you make use of search engine instructions or help documents? Why?
Disappointed to see that it brought back 976 results yet very few were actually about me. Maybe I should have added a few more key words like UH or something so that it could narrow down the search.
10- Give quantitative ratings of the search experience:
+1 pleasant
+1 satisfied
+1 valuable
+1 clarifying
+1 hopefulBack to Top
Prior Generational Reports on Search Engines
"Am I the only one that feels this way?"Comments on Kathy Morifuji's Report 3 on Web Search Engines
a) Kathy's problems with search engines were just like mine. the keywords I typed in were either too vague or too specific so we both encountered poor results or results that were irrelevant. Kathy solved her problem by using more key words. I solved my problem by using a search engine that would search for all words (excite).
b) Kathy's problems is very common and almost everyone will fall into the trap of getting results that seem irrelevant to your search topic. The only way to solve this problem is to keep trying different engines until you find one that fits your interest. Also experimenting with the Boolean variables help. I get really irritated when a search engine returns irrelevant links. So I'm thinking of using more Boolean variables more often.
Jean Leong's Report 3 on Web Search Engines
a) I've noticed a trend in this generation's report on Web Search Engines. They are very brief and don't go into much detail with their experiences. Jean compares the search engine to a library catalog or search facility in the libraries. Her problem was searching for something and getting thousands of results- more than she could or anyone else could handle.
b) The abundance of results is one of the main problems I have with search engines. How can there be thousands of webpages related to my topic when the first ten don't even seem relevant to my search (Altavista example). It really frustrates me. As the old saying goes "quality not quantity" I'd much rather prefer to find less hits but more relevant types. Jean solved the problem by typing in more words. Being more specific in a search would help me also.
Junko Hashizume's Report 3 on Web Search Engines
a) Junko's report is another one of those "computer illiterate to experienced web surfer" stories. Apparently before her only experience with the computer was in word processing and e-mail. She didn't seem to express any problems in searching the net.
b) Just like Junko, I knew almost nothing about computers. All I knew how to do was type on the keyboard to do my reports on a very simple word processing program on the Macintosh. When I took ICS 101, I learned a ton of stuff such as graphic design, spreadsheets, the Internet and even learned how to make my own homepage! If you haven't taken ICS 101, I strongly recommend it. It will really help you out in this course (PSYCH 409) also.
Back to Top
Conclusion
"Final words on the art of searching"a) This experience was very enlightening. Although I've used search engines for a long time, it took a tedious exercise such as this report for me to realize I need to make some modifications in my searches. The two things are: 1) I need to start using Boolean variables so I can get more specific results, and 2) Altavista shouldn't be my preferred search engine. I realize that although it brings back so many results, hardly any of it is relevant.
b) I have two suggestions for future generations: 1) be patient, some of these search engines brings up a lot of crap so you have to take some time to sift through all the junk sites to get to the good ones. 2) use Boolean variables. I never used to use them until Dr. James pointed out the advantages of them. Using the "and" can spell the difference between finding what you are looking for or just a frustrating experience resulting in thousands of useless "hits". Good luck everyone!
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