Seventh Post: Practical 6

For practical 3, we were tasked to make use of the "invisible web" and compare the effectiveness of it in comparison to using the usual search engines and meta search engines. To be honest, I really think that searching via the invisible web really got me more relevant results than the other search facilities as I did not have to filter through any unwanted pages. Not only that, the content of the results were also mostly, although some were similar to previous results, very detailed and gave plenty of information on my topic on cyberbullying. This could be due to the fact that the invisible web contains many specific databases ranging from academics to medicine to science which makes the searching easier as the user can define the database that he wants to search within in order to make the returns more relevant.

I would definitely use the invisible web as one of the various search facilities when I do research within my own diploma in the future as it is a very useful tool to extract information from, especially information that cannot be found on normal public search facilities. With the use of invisible web along with other search facilities, there is no doubt that the information needed would be easier to search for and any reports that need to be done would probably be completed with ease due to the amount of research tools available.

Another part of practical 3 was collaborating via the eir rawkz wiki page. We were supposed to work on our research topic, along with others who were doing the same topic as well. Although I did not manage to provide much information into the wiki space during the lesson itself, I could see the importance of working with others.

Firstly, the information that one missed out could be included by others as shown by the amount of updates by different people. Next, collaborating with others makes the task less tedious as you do not have to do everything by yourself. Instead, various people can do different parts to make it more varied. It was also interesting to see how others formatted their own area of the page to make it more personalised and interesting. All in all, cooperation with others in terms of collating information on the research topic definitely makes the process a whole lot more fun and easy :)