G7 Report 2: Data Collection

Search One
"AltaVista vs. Yahoo: Part 1"

1 - Date & Location: Nov. 17, 1997; the my dorm

2 - Mood: feeling pretty good; ready to go

3 - Search Engine & Familiarity: AltaVista Baby! Kind of partial to this one and use it the most.

4 - Search Statement: Patricia+Ford; Hey I'm a guy OK!? With AltaVista, a "+" is the same as the Boolean operator AND. So I was asking to find pages where both words appear together.

5 - Number of Expected Hits: 987,560 - 6billion people on this planet, 40% male has to be some insane number, especially since it's a search on a good-looking female. Heheh.

6 - Number of Actual Hits: 2811 - Boy am I disappointed in the males of this world.

7 - Reactions of to Hits: Actually, about 3 years ago I did this search and remember the number being kind of large. Wasn't really sure what the number was back then. Probably sites had to be taken down due to excessive traffic or people got scared with the Telecommunications Act.

8 - Evaluation of Hits: For the most part each link was what I was looking for. However all the links which had a geocities address were not found or could not get a connection. Previous experience with this site has pretty much come out the same. From now on I think that I won't even bother with sites on this server.

9 - Comments: Ok, my mood is still the same. I didn't use and specific strategy. All I wanted to do was a simple search. Tried not to get side-tracked too much.

10 - Search Engine Experience Ratings:

	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
Stressful					x			Pleasant
Dissatisfied					x			Satisfied
Wasted						x		Valuable
Confusing						x		Clarifying
Discouraging						x		Hopeful

Search Two
"AltaVista vs. Yahoo: Part 2"

1 - Date & Location: Nov. 17, 1997; the my dorm

2 - Mood: still pretty happy; eager to see what happens

3 - Search Engine & Familiarity: Yahoo; I don't usually use Yahoo too much. It's ok, but still prefer AltaVista.

4 - Search Statement: Patricia+Ford; I used the exact same statement as I did with AltaVista. Wanted to see how it reacts to the "+" as a Boolean operator.

5 - Number of Expected Hits: 1800 - Yahoo categorizes everything, which I find annoying, so I figure it will have less hits than AltaVista.

6 - Number of Actual Hits: 10 - GEEZ!! What's up with this

7 - Reactions of to Hits: Wow! That's way less hits than I expected. Oh well, let's go see how good the turn out is.

8 - Evaluation of Hits: Ok at least all of the links worked.

9 - Comments: I was impressed with Yahoo's results. Even though they were few, all of them seemed pretty accurate. May be I'll see how it does later on a different topic.

10 - Search Engine Experience Ratings:

	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
Stressful						x		Pleasant
Dissatisfied						x		Satisfied
Wasted						x		Valuable
Confusing				x				Clarifying
Discouraging						x		Hopeful

Search Three
"AltaVista vs. Excite: Part 1"

1 - Date & Location: Nov. 17, 1997; the my dorm

2 - Mood: very happy, but a little tired now; damn side tracking

3 - Search Engine & Familiarity: AltaVista; Old Faithful; Want to see if it does better vs. Excite

4 - Search Statement: Rainbow+Basketball; Heheh, told you I'm a guy. Season Tickets Baby! And don't call me a "bandwagoner" because they not real fans, they don't yell. I was there before they got good. =P

5 - Number of Expected Hits: 20 - guessing this because there's only so much you can say about it.

6 - Number of Actual Hits: 75 - oops under guest

7 - Reactions of to Hits: It was more than I thought there was, but a lot of it were "Honolulu Star-Bulletin Sports" stuff. Oh well, next time ask not to include it.

8 - Evaluation of Hits: All the links worked, which was surprising.

9 - Comments: I was pretty satisfied with what I found. However, next time I'll be sure to omit anything related to local newspaper, unless it's what I'm looking for.

10 - Search Engine Experience Ratings:

	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
Stressful						x		Pleasant
Dissatisfied							x	Satisfied
Wasted						x		Valuable
Confusing						x		Clarifying
Discouraging						x		Hopeful

Search Four
"AltaVista vs. Excite: Part 2"

1 - Date & Location: Nov. 17, 1997; the my dorm

2 - Mood: still happy, but a little testy.

3 - Search Engine & Familiarity: Excite; I haven't really used this one too much. Probably less than 10 times. It's alright I guess.

4 - Search Statement: Rainbow+Basketball; typed exactly the same again. Let's see how it takes the "+".

5 - Number of Expected Hits: 50 - sound like a reasonable number.

6 - Number of Actual Hits: 297630 - a lot more than I expected.

7 - Reactions of to Hits: It seemed to be a lot more organized than AltaVista, but not as accurate.

8 - Evaluation of Hits: Well the top match was 75% seemed to have pretty much the same sites as AltaVista. Didn't go through every link. The first couple of pages were pretty accurate.

9 - Comments: What was interesting was that Excite isn't case sensitive. I clicked on the button that said, "About Your Results" and it showed what I typed in lowercase.

10 - Search Engine Experience Ratings:

	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
Stressful					x			Pleasant
Dissatisfied					x			Satisfied
Wasted					x			Valuable
Confusing				x				Clarifying
Discouraging					x			Hopeful

Search Five
"AltaVista vs. Hotbot: Part 1"

1 - Date & Location: Nov. 17, 1997; the my dorm

2 - Mood: feeling good again; just took a nap and shower

3 - Search Engine & Familiarity: Hotbot; First time, only seen friends use it.

4 - Search Statement: "Leon James" - I figured it be interesting to see how many pages it picks up on our Prof.; No Boolean; Exact Phrase

5 - Number of Expected Hits: 500 - I set the "return results" to 100, but it should tell me how many actual hits it found.

6 - Number of Actual Hits: 1052 - Oops underestimated

7 - Reactions of to Hits: Well I kind of figure that the amount of hits would be on the high side because of all the pages in the Generational Curriculum, but didn't think that the search engine would produce so much more hits. Wonder how much results my name would produce. Maybe off the record.

8 - Evaluation of Hits: Wow, it look like it found pretty much the entire Generational Curriculum. There were only a few hits in between that didn't match, but not very many.

9 - Comments: Decided to change it up and use the unfamiliar search engine first. I am impressed with the way this search engine worked. I may put my "old reliable" on the side for a while. Also, I found that the "return result" really mean how many hits it will list on one page and not taking the first so many hits.

10 - Search Engine Experience Ratings:

	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
Stressful							x	Pleasant
Dissatisfied							x	Satisfied
Wasted							x	Valuable
Confusing							x	Clarifying
Discouraging							x	Hopeful

Search Six
"AltaVista vs. Hotbot: Part 2"

1 - Date & Location: Nov. 17, 1997; the my dorm

2 - Mood: more less happy; eager to see how my "old reliable" fairs

3 - Search Engine & Familiarity: AltaVista; use it all the time... competition looks tough now let's see if "old reliable" can pull through.

4 - Search Statement: "Leon James" - Used the same as I did for the previous search; No Boolean; Exact phrase

5 - Number of Expected Hits: 2000 - might possibly pick up a few more hits than HotBot

6 - Number of Actual Hits: 345 - Huummm...

7 - Reactions of to Hits: Kind of surprised it returned fewer hits than I guest. Usually, I returns far more than I expect.

8 - Evaluation of Hits: For the most part the hits were exactly what I was looking for. I was kind of weird and interesting (see below) that the first result was not what I was looking for. Overall however, a good portion of the the hits were on the mark.

9 - Comments: Heheh. I explored the first match which didn't seem to match and found out that Leon James was also the name of a Lindy Hop Dancer. Want to know what I'm talking about? Click here. I guess this is why I like this search engine... the bad matches turn up to be quite interesting. Also, it still returned a pretty good amount of matches. Maybe I'll won't be putting this search engine on the side so quickly after all. =)

10 - Search Engine Experience Ratings:

	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
Stressful						x		Pleasant
Dissatisfied						x		Satisfied
Wasted						x		Valuable
Confusing						x		Clarifying
Discouraging						x		Hopeful

Search Seven
"AltaVista vs. Lycos: Part 1"

1 - Date & Location: Nov. 17, 1997; the my dorm - yes I know I'm a bit stubborn

2 - Mood: still feeling good

3 - Search Engine & Familiarity: Lycos; used it a few times before

4 - Search Statement: "Generational Curriculum" - What the heck, just for fun; No Boolean; Exact phrase

5 - Number of Expected Hits: 20 - guessing that it won't index a word like this too often.

6 - Number of Actual Hits: 2 - humm... even less.

7 - Reactions of to Hits: Well I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say I was disappointed in the search results.

8 - Evaluation of Hits: Only the second match was what I was looking for. Want to know what it was? Click here.

9 - Comments: I don't know if I'd really used this search engine again. It seemed like a cross between Yahoo and AltaVista. It categorizes things, gives an explanation, and doesn't give a percentage of match.

10 - Search Engine Experience Ratings:

	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
Stressful				x				Pleasant
Dissatisfied		x						Satisfied
Wasted			x					Valuable
Confusing				x				Clarifying
Discouraging			x					Hopeful

Search Eight
"AltaVista vs. Lycos: Part 2"

1 - Date & Location: Nov. 17, 1997; the my dorm - yes I know, still stubborn

2 - Mood: still in a good mood; stubborn and want to finish

3 - Search Engine & Familiarity: AltaVista; if search engines were a spectator sport, I'd be a Die Hard fan.

4 - Search Statement: "Generational Curriculum" - Same as above; No Boolean; Exact phrase

5 - Number of Expected Hits: 26 - come on baby give me a perfect match

6 - Number of Actual Hits: 26 - damn, am I psychic or what. nah, just lucky. heheh.

7 - Reactions of to Hits: All of them seem to match.

8 - Evaluation of Hits: Looking through this list of matches wasn't very hard. There was one that I thought wouldn't match so I checked it out and was surprised to see what I found. Are you curious to know what it was? Too bad not this time. Nah, J/J Here you go. By the way, Congratulations Dr. James.

9 - Comments: "Old reliable" still looks pretty good. And if you checked out the link above, I'll say this, "See, that's why I like it. You can find out a lot of interesting things by accident with this search engine." Heheh.

10 - Search Engine Experience Ratings:

	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
Stressful							x	Pleasant
Dissatisfied							x	Satisfied
Wasted							x	Valuable
Confusing							x	Clarifying
Discouraging							x	Hopeful

Search Nine
"HotBot vs. Excite: Part 1"

1 - Date & Location: Dec 6, 1997; at home on the slow computer

2 - Mood: pissed off; annoyed; doing this to take my mind of the big fight I had with my girlfriend (soon to be ex); wanting to get this over with so I can I have one less thing to worry about.

3 - Search Engine & Familiarity: HotBot; Second time using; wanting to be impressed

4 - Search Statement: Poppuru; As is; No Boolean

5 - Number of Expected Hits: 5 - I purposely wanted a low number of hits

6 - Number of Actual Hits: 15 - damn, at least I'm still close

7 - Reactions of to Hits: I was surprised that this many hits showed up.

8 - Evaluation of Hits: Pretty accurate. Didn't check all the matches because I was in a bad mood, but everyone I did check was related.

9 - Comments: I was impressed. Didn't think that this search engine could find more than five matches. I purposely picked something hard to find to see how well it would do. If you're wondering, Poppuru is a Sanrio character. More specifically, one of Pochacco's friends who happens to be a duck.

10 - Search Engine Experience Ratings:

	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
Stressful							x	Pleasant
Dissatisfied							x	Satisfied
Wasted							x	Valuable
Confusing							x	Clarifying
Discouraging							x	Hopeful

Search Ten
"HotBot vs. Excite: Part 2"

1 - Date & Location: Dec 6, 1997; at home on the slow computer

2 - Mood: still pissy and annoyed, but not as bad since my previous search went well.

3 - Search Engine & Familiarity: Excite; I haven't really used this one too much. Maybe more than 10 times now. Seemed to be pretty good from last search (Search 4).

4 - Search Statement: Poppuru; Same as the previous search; As is; No Boolean

5 - Number of Expected Hits: 10 - a little juiced since I just searched for this

6 - Number of Actual Hits: 4 - damn should of used this one first

7 - Reactions of to Hits: It threw me off. I should've used Excite before I did HotBot because it gave me a result I more so expected.

8 - Evaluation of Hits: Only two of the matches turned out to be what I was looking for. It kind of disappointed me, but then again it did have a less than 50/50 chance of being what I was looking for according to it's ratings.

9 - Comments: I was disappointed at it's poor showing, but at least it came up with some matches.

10 - Search Engine Experience Ratings:

	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
Stressful					x			Pleasant
Dissatisfied					x			Satisfied
Wasted					x			Valuable
Confusing					x			Clarifying
Discouraging						x		Hopeful