Research Journal Unit 8

Search Tool Used: Bing

1. automatically does AND searches, no need to put AND in.  e.g. microsoft AND computers =  microsoft computers

2. OR and NOT are still used to combine and exclude words respectively.

3. has an "instant answers" feature for instant answers.  e.g. to define a word just type "define [word]", or "how many minutes are in a day"  "solve 4x + 7 = 35".  for questions with easy fact based answers.

4. the order of the words you search affects the rseults, so put the most important words first.  e.g. treehouse vacation California returns different results than California treehouse vacation.

5. also provides related searches that may provide slightly different results  and help you find what you were looking for.  e.g. like in #4 if you search "treehouse vacation california" then "California treehouse vacation" may come up in the related searches since they have different results



Metasearch Tool Used: Yippy!

1.like bing it automatically uses AND so there is no need to put it in you search

2. is NOT case sensitive

3. you can search specific domains or site using "site:domainname" and "site:sitename" respectively.   e.g. site:edu [search phrase] to search only educational sites that end with ".edu" or  "site:clark.edu" to search for pages that are ONLY on clark.edu.

4.  unlike other search engines you can search for pages of a specific file type using "filetype:type".       e.g. searching  "filetype:pdf trees"  will only return results that are PDF pages

5.  handles OR NOT and "" as normal



Subject Directory used:  Intute

1. unlike Bing and Yippy! does not use AND by default and will change results accordingly when used

2. OR NOT and "" function normally as Boolean operators

3. you can also use a wildcard (*) for truncating

4.  advanced search lets you search by title, description or keywords, you can filter by subject (such as law or psychology) and resource type (such as news, maps, blogs or images) and country of origin, you can also display all fields or titles only and sort by relevance or alphabetically .

5. they also list their criteria for how they select results, which helps you know what may or may notso up no matter what.