Advanced search comparisons
I will use two search engines to do my advanced search, Yahoo and Google. They are both well-known and popular search engines. An advanced search is a very good way of specifying exactly what you are looking for and will dramatically reduces the size of your found search websites, and the sites you have found should be of more relevance. We use searches all the time to help us in our everyday lives, and
Advanced search
When searching there is four main boxes to put information into, asking you to narrow down your searches. With all the words, exact phase, main word, and words you don’t want to include. Also on Google advanced search there is many other boxes like language: you can then be specific from a list of hundreds of languages, this is a good way of speaking for thousands of people, as its not just English and American people that use goggle. Also you can view sites that have copy write or sites that don’t and sites were you can copy information and share information, of homework or revision purposes.
You can also search specifically for ‘.co.uk’ or ‘.com’ sites and not search for .Gov or .Org sites. Another handy devise on the search engine is the use of filtering and safety search. When viewing yahoo’s search engine it’s not as specific and as compact the advanced search page is very long unlike the advanced search goggle page, it looks like this may be a better advanced search as it looks more detailed but on the yahoo search there is no Copy right advanced search
When searching for advanced search, it is easy to find the Google advanced search as it is on the homepage, so you can advance search straight away yet, when using Yahoo, you have too search then click advanced search so its not easy to find. . It is much more un-convenient to have the advanced searches in a scroll down bar, and if you don’t find it straight away you may the look on google instead of using yahoo.
My search
Google
When I first search for ‘weather’ without advanced search, 254,000,000 come up, yet there are many ways of specifying my search. Straight away, I can minimize the amount of sites buy specifying to in the UK my sites to choose from dramatically de-crease to 58,800,000. So first of all I will start by searching for weather, then I want to narrow my search down so I will now search for weather + today, something that I didn’t expect was for my first weather + today search to come up with in UK websites was BBC, world weather, then bellow that was, BBC weather centre, UK which is more appropriate and what I wanted, I had specifically asked for uk sites hoping that uk weather would come up.
Overall for my second search this is good.
Over I million searches is a lot and it is not accurate or precise, so I think I will need to specify my search again to see what happens, I predict putting ‘weather + forecast + today’ and see what happens, on yahoo there was only a small reduction from 1.7 million to 1.4 million so even though that is 30,0000 decrease out of nearly 2 million it is not that much of a decrease in WebPages.
So now I will specify were about in the UK my search is going to be, because i live in the Humber I will now type ‘weather + forecast + today + Humber’ this search has now been dramatically lowered from over 1 million to 23,000 that was very effective.
Now I have proved that adding more words will reduce my search I will do the same with yahoo to draw my conclusion, and compare the two.
Yahoo
Similarly to Google when you search using Yahoo the first thing you can do to de-crease the number of searches is search only in the UK, and the search will go do3wn, form 110,000,000 to just 145,000,000. This is very useful but there are many other ways to use an advanced search.
When typing in ‘weather + forecast’ on Yahoo ‘uk based search’, I thought I would have less than 13,000,000 WebPages but it is still not that accurate and because the weather + forecast can be linked to different types of websites not just weather sites like. ‘BBC, sky, GMTV’ more websites will come up, and other links to other sites I.e. weather forecast on holidays, as well even when I wanted only websites in the UK a weather forecast for Canada, was in my top 10 WebPages on yahoo, when this is not what I wanted at all.
But mostly the searches were UK and BBC, based. This is very useful and the top site was Metoffice.co.uk, which is a very useful website for anything to do with weather forecast but now I want to specify my search more I now want to search for ‘weather + forecast + today + Humber’ my search was very accurate and was dramatically reduced, they appear to be very appropriate responses to my search, from 13,000,000
I now have 54,000 pages and many of those are the same website, but different links which is sometimes not a good thing though. I.e here you can see for number one search there is something that is just what I wanted but, I have for the second search the Metoffice.co.uk site for the second time and this site is not for the Humber, and its not Humber weather today, all though it is a good website for weather it is not what I needed. I was surprised that this came up because for number three it was BBC Humberside weather, which again is a very appropriate and useful website.
But now I have this low amount of web pages I predict by putting BBC, Met office on top of my other search I predict this will reduce my search into low numbers again. This is very effective and now it has been reduced from 14,000 to 645 this is like I predicted very effective. In conclusion I think using OR i.e. cat or dog, so no rabbits come up but both cats and dogs come up, not just one.
Bad searches
On the first page of searches when I searched for weather on yahoo, this website came up, it only has 2 places united kingdom and Australia, Yahoo has clearly misunderstood my search, they are both very far apart and weather for them both will be very different, so searching for UK weather and getting this is un appropriate. My 1st search on yahoo came up with the BBC weather channel which is much more appropriate and I was surprised at this, I thought it would be much better search ion Google, and when you specify your search it does come out well but still there is less efficient web sites with Google than yahoo, and the amount of websites it finds it much more (200) I was surprised to find this.
Google search for weather Yahoo search for weather
Conclusion,
My final search which was weather + forecast + today + Humber. BBC, was of a much better search on yahoo. I generally found more ‘bad’ websites on Google than yahoo, this was un like my prediction because, I usually use Google as I thought Google was a better search engine but my results say differently. Advanced searches are more professional and quicker ways to search for things yet just narrowing down your search is also a good way to search. Many things made think Google would be a better search because, it looks clearer it looks easier to use. I have now shown it is easier and is clearer to use, especially as I have shown the advanced search is very easy to find on Google, but I have been proved wrong as the good searched and more accurate searched tended to be on Yahoo not Google.