Module 4 Search Tasks Combined....

All right this might seem a little bit like cheating but I like to think of it as streamlining. Truth be known, I looked at those tasks for ages and did all the reading ages ago. It just seemed like a better idea to join all the search tasks together. So I made an executive decision. The Copernic confusion also aided in this decision so hey, without further ado.

For those that didn't know, I love fishing. And I have been looking at buying a Kayak. In fact I hired one a week ago and took it out on West Lakes, so I thought I should search for something I was interested in.

kayak +fishing +"West lakes" +SA

This was the search I used. I have been using Boolean search for a long time so I thought I could cut a long story short here by cutting to the chase. I used this Boolean string to narrow the search right down to my desired sites. I did do a second search to nail down to university sites but the results were not what I was after and did not really show the desired effect.

First up Yahoo. Never a first choice by me so it gets the guernsey here in an attempt at fairness...
This is a screen shot of the first five hits on Yahoo. Number 1 hit is on www.sakfa.net
There were 571 sites indexed.


Next up Google. The screen shot shows the first five hits. Number 1 site was www.akff.net
There were 521 sites indexed by google.


Unsurprisingly the two results were fairly similar and were forum heavy. I added a further Boolean limiter with "-forum" to omit the forums from the results. Interestingly Google still returned 350 sites whereas Yahoo returned only 46. I am unsure of the reason for this and I think it requires further investigation. I'll get on to it soon....

Seeing there was that whole problem with Copernic, I decided I would try to find a "multiple search engine" search engine. I chose dogpile. I think it is called dogpile for a reason....

The results were a bit skewed in favour of advertised sites as opposed to organic sites. The major problem with this though was that it was initially difficult to work out that they were advertised sites. It seems to me that dogpile must raise revenue by pushing those Google ad sites up the rankings. Something else I need to investigate methinks...... Aside from the ad sites (and once you dig past them) though the results seem pretty similar to Google and Yahoo.