Searching....

Search Engine Task
Well those few days for the promised review on copernic turned into nearly a month! Unfortunately a few things beyond my control happened all at once and they have contributed to putting my studies about three weeks behind where I would like to be.... catch up time now!

To get on with it... this task was about comparing using a meta search (I used copernic to do this) with the results from using a traditional search engine, for which I used blackle.

First I searched for "attention economy" in blackle. This resulted a massive 955 hits with the first hit being a wikipedia site. The next 4 hits in order were a ReadWriteWeb article, a link to a book at Amazon on the attention economy, a shorter ReadWriteWeb article and a wired article by Michael Goldhaber.

I repeated this in copernic and surprisingly got far less results with 60 hits. The first hit in this instance was a Commonwealth Bank site, that in my opinion didn't discuss the attention economy and was irrelevant. The next hit surprised me as it was the same ReadWriteWeb article as the second hit for blackle! The third hit was the wikipedia site that came up first on blackle and the fifth site was the second shorter ReadWriteWeb article from the balckle search! One big difference though was the fourth hit for copernicus was a First Monday article that did not come up at all on the blackle search.

On first glance blackle actually appeared to give more promising results, well at least more results, though when I first started looking at them there were a lot of rubbish results. Copernicus only gave results that were relevant to the search term, so gave better quality results. Copernicus gave results that included peer reviewed journal and other higher quality data than blackle didn't produce, despite the far higher hit level.

Boolean Searches cchallenge 1 - the biggest number of hits relating to these key words.
While still searching for the term "attention economy" the number of hits can be increased by taking the parenthesis away or searching either of these words. In fact doing this increases hits to hundreds of pages of results in blackle. Unfortunately blackle does not give a total hit count, and scrolling through to the last page of results to get a total hit count yet again seemed tedious! So as blackle runs straight off google I did the search in google and got 66,500,000 hits!

Strangely when I put into Copernicus to search either word I only got 63 results, only 3 more than last time! This leads me to think that I am not using Copernicus right as I would have expected a lot more!

Search challenge 2 - information most relevant to what you ACTUALLY wanted to look for!
Well I would revert to the first searches I did that only looked for the exact phrase "attention economy" with the results of this above!

Search challenge 3 - information coming only from university sources.
In addition to the previous search I would add AND University to my search. I realise this might give some hit that talk about universities in addition to "attention economy", but most the hits should then be from a university.

Doing this in google resulted in 44,300 hits that when I went through some of them a lot were not from universities!

As for Copernicus, I am sure I'm doing something wrong there! No matter how I change my search, as long at the words attention and economy are in it I get between 58 and 63 hits! I can't seem to get more or less at all unless I do something irrelevant and silly - 70 hits for 'attention economy' AND spinach!!!

ARRGH!!! I'm now thinking I don't really know how to search well at all!! And after entering this task full of confidence that I know how to search effectively.... I'm off to stew on it a bit and work out where I went wrong!

Reviewing.....
... the final task in module 4! I've been asked to review one of the three best sites from the previous task. For this we saved the three sites we thought were the best (so they can go towards the concepts assignment). I saved mine in Microsoft word.... yes you read that right! I have used End Note before and though about ising it for this assignment, but I didn't like using it last time. So for now I will stick to word while I try and find another platform that actually suits me!

As for the site I am reviewing an article called "Attention Economy: All You Need To Know". The purpose of this site is clearly to give a brief overview of the attention economy. I emphasise the word brief here as the site deffinitely doesn't give a great deal of coverage on the topic!

The article itself initially appears to have no bias. On closer inspection though the article only gives a brief introduciton and then links at the bottom to 4 other articles all published by ReadWriteWeb. So the bias is to get you to read more articles from the same publication, given that the current article is written by Richard MacManus the founder of ReadWriteWeb!

The article is fairly current in itself as it is written in 2007, and although it is only building on other work, the articles it links to are all also 2007 articles.

In terms of recognition by others for this work, I was unable to find anyone else who had recognised this work..... maybe I didn't search enough or more likely the fact that it is just a summary of articles, within a non-peer revieded online magazine, makes it not credable enough that anyone will referece it.

While this is one of the better sources in the above searches, I probably won't use it for my assignment, at least no further than as a starting point for my own research.

Edit 24/5/09..... where I went wrongwith Copernicus!!
First thanks Kate, reading your post helped me work out where I went wrong! Looks like I was using the wrong version of Copernicus.... I should be using Copernicus Agent. Before I was using Copernicus Desktop, and when I clicked for a web search it was just taking me to their website - I was wondering where this supposed ability to select search engines used came in!

Anyway now that I have looked at the right version of Copernicus my first 5 hits were still the same!! In fact the searches I tried were all fairly close to identical.... so I am still not that impressed with Copernicus....