This week I used Power Search. It offers several boxes to search for queries within the following options: anywhere; summary; title; first heading; and Web location (URL). Other useful search options that Power Search provides include: and; or; but not; near; and follow by. I found this search tool quite confusing and too sophisticated for me so I decided to constrict my search on "online magazines" to "anywhere" and ignore the rest. Power Search gave a lot of references (392 hits were returned) and presented 10 hits at a time. It also included options to improve my search results or start a new search, but I decided to stick with what I had.
I like the way Power search presents its results. It first puts the reference's link with its URL address and then gives a brief synopsis of what the site has to offer. In addition, it offers options such as: visit the page; see matches on the page; and find similar pages. I find these tools very practical in narrowing down a search.
Subsequently, I chose a link to a site called Magazines since it includes links that I was interested in (such as to online magazines in English, other languages, etc.). Actually, when I linked into the Magazine Online page it offered some more links to other magazines including the Hispanic magazine, Autoweek magazine, NewScience magazine, People magazine, Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, et al. Although it offers a wide selection, I chose to review only Time.
The Time World Wide Home Page offers a variety of helpful clickable buttons such as Search Files, Talk to Time, Universe Map, etc. I clicked first on the Search Files which presented news on various issues that included these items: Unabomber (the country's most prolific bomber); Dawn of the Atomic Age (remembering Hiroshima 50 years after the bomb was dropped); Hit City (a link to movie, TV, multimedia, music and book reviews from the pages of Time, Entertainment Weekly, and VIBE magazines); Campaign 96 (news on the candidates with a calendar and the most current poll information leading up to the election); etc.
The Talk to Time link is basically a customer service page where a browser can use the FAQ and some other help tools. I found the Universe Map link much more comprehensive since it provides links to all the sites that exist on the Time World Wide Home Page. This index-like site is designed in a circular shape and related topics are divided into sections and each section is colored differently. It is indeed an interesting and creative way to construct an index. From the Universe Map site I chose a link to Today's News where the news is updated continuously throughout the day. The headline news for November 14, 1995 included reports on the US. government's financial crisis and its potential shut down, an explosion in Saudi Arabia, Israel giving up a town in the West Bank to the Palestinians (the town of Jenin becomes the first to gain autonomy under the agreement signed by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli president Yitzhak Rabin last September), a money report, and sports. This site also provides a picture illustration with each story. I found this site very informative since it covers news on various domains and it was basically designed for anybody to read.
The Internet offers accessibility to various online magazines which I think we should take advantage of since this kind of communication resource offers different perspectives on news from all over the world. Now people everywhere can be updated on valuable news via the Internet. At the same time, however, we need to remember that what gets reported is not always the whole truth.