Thursday, January 11, 2007

Module Four. Boolean

A.
The best way to search for 'Advanced Internet Users' in my opinion would be to check the "use exact phrase" box, if available, or use the boolean equivelant.
Using the 'and' or 'or'command would produce more, but a great deal of the resulting material would be of little or no use.

A.
Using the term 'exact phrase' when searching alta vista for 'Advanced internet users', produced 2,690 results.
Browsing through the first few pages it appears that this search has produced more quality results as opposed to using the basic request for 'Avanced internet users' which produced 50,300,000 results, most of which, on browsing the first few pages, were of little or no relevance or interest to me.

B.
Searching for skills based information in Advanced Internet Users, I first tried 'skills-based information+Advanced Internet users' on Google, and got 163,000 hits, but I am not sure whether the instruction means to use an actual skill, like using html, and link that with advanced internet users.
Tried 'telnet' "advanced internet users" via Alta Vista and the results were a bit more promising.
Using the same option via google returned 154 hits with the first page at least producing some promising results.

C.
To search for 'Advanced internet users' from university resources, I tried a number of options.
The first was through GOOGLE using the exact phrase option plus 'University' as the extra word option.
The result was 307 hits, though they were not all from university sources.
Next I tried 'Ask.com' using the command 'Advanced internet users + edu' with the exact phrase box checked. This resulted in 378000 hits
Browsing the first few pages it was obvious that the exact phrase option had not been successful, and I was getting results unrelated to my requirements.
Applying the same search to INFOMINE, a schollarly internet resource, produced 7 hits.
Using quotation marks, "advanced internet users" produced 2 hits, both with the exact phrase but in the field of chemistry.
I finally tried the search via Google,"Advanced internet users" phrase: .edu on the advice of Kerri Bennett, (discusion board, item No. 1622).
This was more successful.

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