We all have different ways of looking for information online. With so many different search engines and databases available to extract from its almost guaranteed you will find what you are looking for. The question then becomes how reliable is the information who have received? In this essay I will be describing my search processes on an Internet medium that I am researching. I also will be describing specific ways of researching for that medium and how reliable the information I found turned out to be.
For my Internet medium project I will be researching the photo sites Flickr, and Photobucket. Specifically how they came about and what makes them so popular. I will be using many different key words and seeing which is the best to gain the most valuable information. I will also be using many different search engines to try and broaden different search results. For my research I will be using the search engines Google.com and Yahoo.com for my web results. For print and news media I will be using the UAlbany library database. The reason I am choosing Google and Yahoo is because of there popularity. They are the two most popular search engines of my generation. Another plus to them being the most popular is the money they have to constantly upgrade their databases. This helps to give them perfect reach and perfect recall. (Zimmer, 2008) Having this two search engines at my disposal will give me a vast amount of information and, because this type of medium is relatively new the chances of academic books being written about them are much slimmer. This is why I will also be using The UAlbany library databases. Because the only major problem with the World Wide Web is that it is according to Whitaker “a huge national library- although one frequently lacking quality control.” (p. 48) Since UAlbany is a place of academics I can trust in its databases to have reliable and factual information instead of completely made up spam-ridden garbage
That you can find on the Internet. As I stated earlier though, my focus will be on searching with Google and Yahoo due to the limited academic resources that will be at hand for the specific medium I am researching.
I guess I should tell you what Flickr and Photobucket are before I move on. Flickr and Photobucket are websites where you create your own profile and upload photos onto them for everyone to see. It is basically like myspace and facebook without all the words and other nonsense. Think of it as a blogging site but, only used for pictures and not words. Photobucket is a little bit different in that you can edit and change your photos drastically for the world to see.
For my first search I went to Google and looked up History of Flickr. The results were a little bit varied but what came up was expected. The first website was Wikipedia.org because it had an exact match to the key words entered. After that there were a couple links to Flickr with history photos. After that came a couple news articles and some blog sites. According to the little counter at the top of Google’s screen about 19,000,000 results came up for the key words used. When I used the same key words at Yahoo as I did in Google the results were only moderately different. The first result was Wikipedia the next were some links to Flickr but, different from the ones on Google. Again though, the same couple news articles came up. The major difference however, was that there were 97,5000,000 results instead of 19,000,000 like Google. I do not worry about this quantity difference. My focus is the quality of what is being given to me and by looking at the first page of results for each search engine are relatively the same. I attribute that fact to the engines perfect reach capability. (Zimmer, 2008) Without that it would be throwing garbage at me left and right instead of trying to match up exactly what I am looking for.
What I would keep from the two search engines would definitely be the information from Wikipedia. Whatever news resources and articles I can find I will use and compare them to the ones I find on UAlbany’s library databases. The ones, which I will probably steer away from, are those of the blog sites. I will stay away from them only because they are opinionated statements and could detract from what I am trying to research. Search engines have many capabilities and with the everyday advancement of technology it will get closer and closer to being perfect every time.
CITATION:
Zimmer, Michael. (2008). The externalities of search 2.0: The emerging privacy threats when the drive for the perfect search engine meets web 2.0. First Monday, 13. Retrieved August 21, 2008 from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2136/1944
Whitaker, Jason. (2002). The Internet: The basics (chapter 1). New York: Routledge.
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