Practical 4 & 5

Relevant keywords: Animal, Cruelty, Prevention
Variations:
- Animal: n/a
- Cruelty: Barbarity, Brutality, Inhumanity
- Prevention: Determent, Deterrence, Forestallment

Search Phrases: (Animal*) AND (Cruelty OR Barbarity OR Brutality OR Inhumanity) AND (Prevention* OR Determent OR Deterrence OR Forestallment)

1.)
Search Engine used: http://www.google.com.sg/
Keyword(s) used: (animal*) AND (cruelty OR brutality) prevention
URL of the resource: http://www.aspca.org/
Number of hits: 1,130,000
Comments: Searching animal cruelty gave me 3,160,000 hits so the proper search technique has helped me cut down the websites to a third of the original number, which is a fair amount. This makes the resources more relevant to what I am searching for.

2.)
Meta Search Engine used: http://www.metacrawler.com/
Keyword(s) used: animal cruelty
URL of the resource: http://www.pet-abuse.com/pages/animal_cruelty.php/
Number of hits: 66
Comments: Metacrawler has assisted in finding resources that were not in the first few pages of Google, but in other search engines.

3.)
Subject Directory used: http://dir.yahoo.com/?skw=yahoo+directory/
Keyword(s) used: n/a (browsed the categories)
URL of the resource: http://www.inhumane.org/
Number of hits: 23
Comments: The subject directory helps a lot by categorising the topics. Under the topic Animal Abuse, all of the sites there are related to animal abuse or animal cruelty, so the search becomes much more efficient for me as I can browse through all of the sites due to their relevance.

Comparison and evaluation of search effectiveness:
2 characteristics that make all 3 search facilities similar or different:
1. Search engines and meta search engines are machine compiled, while subject directories are human compiled. The human compiled search facility is more reliable. It needs time to be approved however, so it will take more time than a machine compiled search facility.

2. The difference between a search engine and the meta search engine is how it searches for information. A meta search engine searches for the most relevant results from many search engines, which makes it more efficient.

Strength/Weaknesses:
The search engine returns a large amount of hits, so the user has a wider choice. However, these choices may or may not be relevant.

The meta search engine returns only the most relevant choices from many search engines, but there are very few hits, so the user has very little to choose from.

The subject directory is human compiled, so the information there is more relevant than the search engine or the meta search engine. Unfortunately, the links need to be reviewed before posting, so there is a significantly larger lag time in link posting or uploading.

Overall:
The search engine meets my needs best. I need many choices to choose from so that I can decide the ones I need to keep. At the very most, I can edit the search keywords myself to narrow the search.