Research Journal Part 4 SUMMARY

This was an interesting exercise, not without some frustration, but quite revealing when all the search information was placed side by side. In the domain exercise, I found I had to change my original search statement to come up with articles that focused more on my subject. By substituting the more specific phrase "REAL ID", the results were much better. I chose to use ASK.com since I had just discovered this search engine in the last assignment. I decided to see what I could find using the tools they offered. It was easy to use and I found some interesting documents in all four top-level domain areas. Each offered something different to the topic as well as some obvious biases. I believe the best results were in the .edu search, although the .org article I found was so full of information and links that it was a great benefit to researching my topic. Both of these articles were well-documented and produced a gold mine in the area of additional resources. The best part about these two sources was that the information was laid out for me to research and determine my position. I was surprised that my results for .gov yielded more in the way of partisan opinion than the .edu sites.

I chose INFOMINE for my subject directory, but I must have tried nearly all of them using various search statements. I had a hard time drawing up any documents that looked like they pertained to my topic. In time I found some search methods that seemed to work well on INFOMINE and stuck with that directory. Whereas I had to tighten my search statement for the domain exercise, here I had to broaden it considerably. I believe that with a little practice this might be a beneficial tool even if it was somewhat frustrating in the beginning. I would say that I might be less inclined to lean toward subject directories since discovering the ability to concentrate on specific top-level domain searches. That, in my opinion, is a wonderful tool.