I guess I did not really select any of the other
hundred or so other search
engines out there because just to get to
those search engines or to type in their
addresses took me too long. To
get to their address, I had to first go to Dr. James page which listed all
the search engines and just to
remember the address or to go through his
homepage and clicking through
a couple of other pages just took too
long. To pick Lycos, as soon as I
got into netscape I could just hit
the net search button, even before the
document was fully loaded. I
guess I picked the search engine Lycos
because I was familiar with the
style of how it searched for information,
but if it was not for that I
would probably just randomly pick one of the
five search engines. I
later discovered that there was also a list of
other search engines as
one scrolls down that same page, but it took me
about ten seconds to
load this page and I guess I did not really want to
wait that long so I
decided to just use what was on hand. I guess I
really picked Lycos
because of convenience, it was located at the beginning of the
document.
If it was located on the bottom, where the other search
engines were, I
do not think I would have picked it.
After I clicked on the Net Search
button, I saw five search engines (Infoseek Guide, Lycos, Magellan,
Excite, and Yahoo). I then clicked on Lycos, the second button from the
left and the net search program went into Lycos.
From there I typed in the word dream into
the search and found that there were over 40,000 documents containing the
word dream and close to 28,000 documents
containing the word dreams.
I did not really take notice of anything like the percentage sign or
anything like that but just went by the order of the results listed, to
select from.
To do my report, I did not really bookmark
anything, like Dr. James suggested. But I just kept my word processor
open and netscape open at the same time. It was easier then bookmarking
everything because once I found an address in my report which I
wanted to copy, all I had to do was cut and paste.
Here is a partial list of what I found when I entered the keyword
"dream" but unfortunately these were of no real help to me, the following
is what I hit on
Then on the screen I got, a
message which stated that the search had
produced over 180,000 with the
word "dream" (43,000), "dreams"
(28,000), and analysis (49,000). The
list then contained all the
documents with a combination of these. From
there I clicked on
Dreams:
Content Analysis Explained. On the bottom of this message it stated
how
many words were relevant to my search, included with a percentage
sign.
I did not really understand what this percentage sign
represented and it was kind a frustrating, but I assumed that the higher
the percentage sign, the more relevant the search was to me. At this
point in time, even though I did not understand what this percentage sign
meant, I figured that by the short description by each name which was
given was enough to help me continue my search.
After inserting a second word into my search I found that it was much
more precise then ifI had just typed in one word. But at times I still was
frustrated because I kept clicking on pages from people who I felt did
not really know whatthey were talking about, or people who were looking for
a quick buck trying to analyze your dreams.
I did not really want a list of just stupid
list of 900 numbers which
charge you for your dream interpretations, so
therefore I then entered the
word "sleep", with dream
analysis sleep much more relevant information. After typing in
these keywords, I discovered that I got a more precious listing of what I
wanted, a scientific view point of what dreams are and how they are
interpreted. Also what I noticed was that after each title, was a short
description about the topic. What I found was
that you could also find a lot of information about that subject by just
what it says. Take for instance if the document came from a chat group or
private organization I found that most of the time, this was not what
I was really looking for. But if
the information was from a journal or some doctor I found that the article
was much more interesting, and relevant to what I was looking for.
One also was able to tell if this information was written from a
journal article or if some doctor published the report because in the net
search there was usually a short description after the highlighted text.
The short description further elaborated on the content of the article.
If the article came from a journal or
something like that there was usually a date, month, and volume of the
published article. If the article came from a doctor, then the article
usually featured the individual's name as well as were s/he worked at.
As I continued to view my search list I then found that there was
link called
Yahoo -
Science:Psychology:Sleep and Dreams, so I decided to click on that.
To my surprise I discovered that I got to Yahoo's search engine of sleep
and dreams. I further experimemted and clicked on other icons in Yahoo's
search engine and discovered a vast amount of information.
The format was a little
different then
Lycos. First of all Yahoo had preselected terms into
categories which
was very helpful, and Yahoo had alphabetized the
articles which it had
found, rather then rate the categories by percentage which Lycos did. I
was pretty pleased with these results and kinda surprised that one search
in one search engine would allow me to gather information in a
competitor's search engine. But I was really happy with the results
because this gave me additional information on my topic.
