Module 4 Searching the Web

LOG ENTRY: record the first hit and number of hits in your learning log.

LOG ENTRY: set up a search using a metasearch engine , record the number of hits and compare to your first search. What differences did you notice? Why? Which search, on first glance gave you the most promising results?

My Pride and Joy - born on 4th July 2008

I have been cycling with a long distance cycling club (Audax Australia) for around 14 years now and I am still learning. One of the most important aspects of this sport is to ensure that the body gets the correct fuel in the quantity that it can absorb during the hours of exertion. I have only recently begun to get very interested in this topic. (I should really not admit this, but I seem to have survived by doing the wrong things). In the last twelve months I have dropped around 10kg of weight and purchased my pride and joy.

I tell you this because for this task I have decide to research more about nutrition in long distance cycling. My favourite (and everybody else’s , it seems) is Google. I type in the four words and ended up with 313,000 hits. The first 5 hits are shown in the screen shot below.

I had loaded Copernic Agent Basic in the previous task, so stuck with it for this search. Copernic returned 42 results. These are listed here:

Copernic Search 19th February 2009

The first thing that I noticed was that the first three hits were related to long distance telephone calls. Nothing to do with cycling at all. The other major difference was the number of hits that were produced. Some further investigation revealed that Copernic utilises 11 search engines and Google is not one one of them. The screenshot below shows the engine utilised.

I was not really satisfied with this result, so I went in search of another meta search engine. I came upon the online engine Search.com. This time the search returned 172,080 hits. The first 5 hits were all for cycling tours or advertisements , it was not until half way down the page that any reference to nutrition was found. For interest I have shown the first five results :

I have found that Google generally provides me with all the results that I need. I suspect that Google has the economy of scale to be able to crawl the web to produce the comprehensive results that it does. It also has a smart feature that gives results based on web history. I am not sure how it works, but it managed to filter out long distance telephone calls which are totally irrelevant to my requirements.