Fourth Post: Practical 3

Another EIR lesson after a long thursday. To be truthful, it is refreshing to have a lesson that does away with books after an exhausting day.

Our lesson today was basically to introduce us to some available search engines as well as how to properly enter a search query, in order to gain maximum relevance in the results. As such, we were advised not to use keywords that were too common (e.g. the, an, a, of) as they would flood our return results with useless entries. Single keywords were also advised against as the results returned would be made up of a huge list of useless entries, with a minority of relevant results hidden somewhere within the long list of results. The search engines we were told to use were Google and Google Scholar.

Proceeding on with the lesson, we were taught some methods to make our research on search engines easier. How? By having multiple keywords as well as keyword variations. With those, it would help our search be more versatile as similar words that could be linked to our research topic could be picked up and be assessed by us for the usefulness. However, for the keywords and keyword variations to work properly, they have to be combined together with boolean operators. Basically, boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR, NOT, N) connect the keywords together so that searches can be narrowed down to give results that are close to our keywords and variations. For my research topic, "Impact of Cyber-bullying on internet users", I managed to come up with the following keywords and keyword variations(in brackets):

Impact(effect)
cyber(virtual, cyber)
bullying(harass, abuse)
online users(computer users)

It wasn't a huge number of variations, but I was definitely happy with them as I was sure that it would definitely narrow my search for more relevance with regards to my topic. With the keyword and variations down, we were instructed to combine them with the boolean operators (which we were provided examples of, as mentioned above) to create our search queries. Here is what I came up with:

(impact OR effect*) AND (cyber* OR virtual OR online) AND (bully* OR harass* OR abuse) AND (internet users OR computer users)

I was proud to be able to come up with something like that as all I ever used in the past were "". With the newly created self query, the results dropped from millions to a mere 59,000.

Between the two search engines introduced today, I would have to say Google was more helpful as it allowed more modifications to the search. Some functions include,

"I'm feeling Lucky" which would bring me to the first result returned from my search query. This would make my research faster as I would be able to enter the page immediately.

Google was also able to filter results based on languages. Therefore, there was no worry that results returned would be in other languages other than english.

Other features include the ability to choose how many results you wanted in the page, the file types of the results returned as well as choosing results that were within a certain date range.

With that much functionality, I was definitely impressed with Google, much more then before. Google Scholar, on the other hand, was helpful in it's own right. However, the functions and features were mostly more suited for academic research and not for more social topics like the one I was assigned to. Therefore, Google was more helpful in the research.

With the lesson closing off, we were told to do citations to our sources after we had done what we needed to. Although a hassle, I realize the need for citations as it is a sort of credit to the original creator/author of the object that we have used. Therefore, in order to avoid some sort of plagiarism, credit has to be given where it is due. To fulfil the bibliography, all we had to do was to combine the citations into a list.

Last but not least, I am glad to say that I have entered into discussions within a discussion forum with regards to my research topic on Cyber-bullying. Reading the other posts by other users, it definitely increased my knowledge on Cyber-bullying. Not soon after, I contributed some. It was a rather nostalgic feeling as it was a long time since I started a new topic as well as replied others. I hope that the replies will come flooding in soon so that I would be able to progress in my research topic.

I guess today has been a very long day, much longer than other thursdays as real work on EIR project began today. Our portfolio part one is due very soon and I hope that I will be able to keep up and do my best in every part.

Until the next post.