Search on Coupons
1) Day, date, location
Friday November 7th at home

2) My mood or affective state
I feel calm.

3) Search engine being used and my experience with it
Yahoo is a search engine I have used several times and am comfortable using.

4) Search statement used and a little about how I went about getting the information
coupon is what I typed in. I thought it would be interesting to see what types of coupons would be found. I intentionally tried to be vague.

5) Number of Expected hits
I expected a couple of thousand hits to be pulled up by Yahoo.

6) Number of actual hits
What I found was six categories of coupons and 442 site matches.

7) My reaction to questions 5 and 6
I expected a large amount of hits and that is what I got! It sure can take some time to go through what is presented to you. The information is great! You can down load coupons right to your printer. And the variety of coupons that is available is unbelievable. It is possible to find advertising information here also, of course. There was even a coupon book for people who are interested in visiting Hawaii.

8) My evaluation of the hits
I was very pleased with the results of the hits I received. It was fun to look through some of the information.

9) How I feel about the process
In this being my initail search, I simply looked around on a vague request of "coupons". I was calm so I suppose this influenced my interst to look into a variety of the coupon hits that were given by Yahoo.
Ratings

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Search on Coupons
1) Day, date, location
Friday November 7th at home

2) My mood or affective state
I feel calm.

3) Search engine being used and my experience with it
The search engine that I used is Magellan, I have never used this search engine before.

4) Search statement used and a little about how I went about getting the information
Again I simply typed in the word coupons.

5) Number of Expected hits
I expected closer to 500 hits this time around.

6) Number of actual hits
I actually received 1426 hits.

7) My reaction to questions 5 and 6
I was surprised that this Magellan came up with a larger amount of hits than did Yahoo.

8) My evaluation of the hits
I feel that I enjoyed the Yahoo search more than that of Magellan due to the way Yahoo separated information. Magellan has everything clumped together while Yahoo had categories to focus in on.

9) How I feel about the process
I don't think my mood affected the search.
Ratings

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Search on Cocker Spaniels
1) Day, date, location
Saturday November 29th at home

2) My mood or affective state
Fresh!

3) Search engine being used and my experience with it
Yahoo

4) Search statement used and a little about how I went about getting the information
Cocker Spaniel

5) Number of Expected hits
Expecting around 2,000 hits

6) Number of actual hits
Actually got 10,000 hits

7) My reaction to questions 5 and 6
Wow, this is great, the information was so varied, I enjoyed browsing.

8) My evaluation of the hits
80% of the hits were releveant to what I was interested in finding.

9) How I feel about the process

Ratings

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Search on Cocker Spaniels
1) Day, date, location
Saturday November 29th at home

2) My mood or affective state
Calm

3) Search engine being used and my experience with it
Magellan

4) Search statement used and a little about how I went about getting the information
Typed in Cocker spaniels

5) Number of Expected hits
I expected around 10,000 hits as my search in Infoseek gave me.

6) Number of actual hits
I actually got 26,776 hits!

7) My reaction to questions 5 and 6
Many of the hits were not of interest to me.

8) My evaluation of the hits
I feel that maybe 50% of the hits were relevant. Some of the information just was not of interest to me. I think that the first search in Infoseek probably had similar information yet I did not investigate as many of those hits.

9) How I feel about the process

Ratings

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Search on Hermit crabs

1) Day, date, location
Saturday November 29th at home

2) My mood or affective state
I am getting a little irritated with this

3) Search engine being used and my experience with it
Yahoo is the first search engine that I chose to use

4) Search statement used and a little about how I went about getting the information
I typed in hermit crab

5) Number of Expected hits
I expected around 100 hits

6) Number of actual hits
I actually got 3 hits

7) My reaction to questions 5 and 6
I was disappointed with the amount of hits, yet one of the sites was very informative on the background of hermit crabs.

8) My evaluation of the hits
One of the three hits was of interset to me. The others seemed silly, one was some lady's home page of her pets and the other was a page advertising a place that sells shells.

9) How I feel about the process
My mood is drifting, I will have to stop after this search is complete. I am disappointed in what I found, yet I was not specific in what I was looking for!
Ratings

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Search on Hermit Crabs
1) Day, date, location
Saturday November 29th at home

2) My mood or affective state
I am about ready to stop this for a while, I am no longer patient

3) Search engine being used and my experience with it
I am using Magellan

4) Search statement used and a little about how I went about getting the information
I typed in Hermit crab for a search

5) Number of Expected hits
I expected 10 hits

6) Number of actual hits
I actually got 35,989 hits

7) My reaction to questions 5 and 6
I wondered why there were so many hits this time around?!

8) My evaluation of the hits
I was excited at first by the number of hits until I started to go through them. Many of the sites were relating to story's or other information that just did not spark an interest in me. Many of the hits seemed to be repeats of hits that were already given. Why do they do this?

9) How I feel about the process
I was not pleased with the results of the search and now I am going to take a break!
Ratings

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Search on Adoption
1) Day, date, location
It is Friday, 12-12-97 9:30 pm

2) My mood or affective state
I am tired and I feel like I am getting a sinus infection.

3) Search engine being used and my experience with it
I am using Yahoo

4) Search statement used and a little about how I went about getting the information
I typed in adoption

5) Number of Expected hits
I expected around 10,000 hits

6) Number of actual hits
I actually got 14 categories with 699 sites

7) My reaction to questions 5 and 6
I was disapointed at the low number of hits at first, yet the information that was available was relevant to my interests so that made me happy.

8) My evaluation of the hits
I searched through a few of the sites and found many support groups and information for people looking to adopt children along with organizations that help people become reunited. It was interesting and I enjoyed the sites.

9) How I feel about the process
I thought my mood would affect my search in a negative way, yet I was able to dive into the info here similarly to other sites. I think my interest level of the topic kept me going also.
Ratings

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Search on Adoption
1) Day, date, location
Today is Friday 12-12-97 at 10:00 pm

2) My mood or affective state
I am tired and feel that a back rub would be benefitial at this time!

3) Search engine being used and my experience with it
I am using Magellan

4) Search statement used and a little about how I went about getting the information
I typed in adoption, just as I had done for the Yahoo search.

5) Number of Expected hits
I expected around 500 hits.

6) Number of actual hits
I actually got close to 7,000 hits!

7) My reaction to questions 5 and 6
I suppose I was a bit overwhelmed.

8) My evaluation of the hits
Some of the hits that I observed had to do with people who were some how touched by adoption. These were segments really. What seemed to be happening is that people had home pages and linked the word adoption to them. It was interesting to dive into some of these peoples personal lives, I even found some web page design information.

9) How I feel about the process
I spent about 30 minutes here. So many of these sites just pull me in and I loose track of time. I am tired, but I just keep going because the links never seem to come to an end.
Ratings

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Search on diamonds
1) Day, date, location
It is Friday 12-12-97 11:55 pm

2) My mood or affective state
I am almost ready for bed

3) Search engine being used and my experience with it
Yahoo

4) Search statement used and a little about how I went about getting the information
diamonds

5) Number of Expected hits
Expected around 1,000 hits

6) Number of actual hits
Actually got 1,019

7) My reaction to questions 5 and 6
Not surprised

8) My evaluation of the hits


9) How I feel about the process

Ratings

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Search on diamonds
1) Day, date, location
Friday, 12-12-97 11:57

2) My mood or affective state
Totally tired, and my sinuses are acting up! As if you want to know?

3) Search engine being used and my experience with it
Used Mageallan

4) Search statement used and a little about how I went about getting the information
typed in diamonds just like Yahoo search

5) Number of Expected hits
expected 1,000 hits

6) Number of actual hits
actually got 2,018 hits

7) My reaction to questions 5 and 6
I wonder if there is a pattern to my searches. Magellan always seem to double the hits.

8) My evaluation of the hits


9) How I feel about the process

Ratings

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2. Prior Generational Reports on Search Engines

Michelle Alonzo

a word of caution: DO NOT REPLACE YOUR SOCIAL LIFE WITH THE WEB!!!

It also has affected my personality somewhat. I tend to avoid pages that take too long to load. Because I know that the links will come up anyway, I tend to quickly press the "stop" button after 30 seconds and just search the links that are on the page. Naughty huh?

Michelle used Yahoo and Alta Vista as her search engines. It did not seem that she had too many problem beside narrowing her topic of interest when using a search engine. She seemed to achieve the results she wanted by limiting the words that she typed in for the search.

Shawna Honeycutt

One problem that Shawna mentioned was that it is easy to get side tracked. I must agree with her on that one! I too find myself getting sucked in to all the information that is out there. A half hour can pass you by in no time at all, maybe it would be a good idea to make a habbit of looking at a clock regularly when you are on the web?

I also learned that it is best to look things up in more then one search engine to get the best results.

Although I like to surf around and see what I can find, if the page does not grab my attention I leave. I guess that I am not like a lot of other people, I like to look at icons and I think that they are really cute, so I try to put them on my page to make it simple and cute. Another thing that I don't spend a lot of time on is reading text. It is kind of like judging a book by its cover they say not to do it but eveyone dose.

Jami Kaneshiro
For some reason the computer that I was using just wouldn't let me get into net search and I began to get frustrated. The computer would pop up with an error message and shut down netscape all together and restart the computer. I had to wait everytime for the computer to restart and load Netscape again. I finally quit and went to the CLIC lab.

Jami seemed to experience the problem of not finding enough information from the search engines. Persistence paid off for Jami in eventually finding the right resources by continuing searching on various search engines.

When I first started, I did searches that resulted in tens of thousands of pages that were relevant. There was no way that I could sift through all of that. I began reading the help pages and found better ways of inputting key words and how to use Boolean searching.

A common complaint among the three reports I visited was that the time it took to load a page was discourageing. If a page took too long they were likey to click on the stop button. I do the same! Another common aspect was the interest of how a page looks. The better it looks the more likely someone will stick around and read it!

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