Discussion 3 :)

In our third discussion we are to blog about search engines. Amongst the search engines that are to be discussed are: 

- Google Scholar

- Mamma.com

- Eric Digest

- Yahoo.com

Google Scholar

I would say as the name indicates, is most useful for students, especially for university students such as ourselves, to search for factual articles related to a certain field. This in my opinion is very good source of information as the "hits" about any given topic are all researched based and are therefore reliable. As apposed to Wikipedia which has been my source of information to all my unanswered question, until of course I was told that the information posted can be edited/posted by the general public who might or might not be experts in the field of discussion.

From this one may note that the hits from "Google Scholar" would be more appropriate for assignments than what you would find using "Google". 

Futhermore one cannot use "Google Scholar" to search for random things unlike "Google" as "Google Scholar" functions more as a directory of theses, articles and abstracts from academic publishers.

This was what I found when I search for the "Google Scholar" description:

What is Google Scholar? 
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Features of Google Scholar

• Search diverse sources from one convenient place
• Find papers, abstracts and citations
• Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web
• Learn about key papers in any area of research

How are articles ranked?
Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page.

Mamma.com

Mamma.com is a Metasearch engine, its function is to sift through other search engines such as Yahoo.com and Google.com to look for information regarding the topic of your choice. Hence the name "Mamma.com" is apt. It literally functions as a mother or rather "the mother of all search engines". Using Mamma.com would mean that students in search of information would be able to source for information faster,easier and more effectively. You will find that while using Mamma.com one would be able to find more information from all over the internet with just a click of a button. No longer is a search limited to that, that is found within only one search engine.

Below we have a definition on what a Metasearch engine is:

A search engine that queries other search engines and then combines the results that are received from all. In effect, the user is not using just one search engine but a combination of many search engines at once to optimize Web searching. For example, Dogpile is a metasearch engine. 

Dogpile is another example for a Metasearch engine, Dogpile's search in itself consists of information sourced from Google, Yahoo, Ask and Live Search. Why not put four search engines to work on something in the same time it takes to use one? 

Eric Digest

Eric Digest has a similar funtion as compared to “Google Scholar” and this is because Eric Digest consists of articles or rather “Eric Digests” about a multitude of topics. These reports are found to be short (1,000-1500 words) and cover mostly topics of prime current interest in education, it also covers topics like teaching, learning, libraries, charter schools, special education, higher education, home schooling and much more.

What information one would find on Eric Digest is considerably short, although references are provided for more detailed information. Eric Digest is said to target mostly educators such as teachers, administrators, policy makers and other practitioners. This is I find is the defining point, the point that separates Google Scholar and Eric Digest, the community it caters to is entirely different. While Google Scholar caters to students mostly, Eric Digest caters to those already in their professional fields. 

Yahoo.com

Yahoo.com on the other hand is indeed very different from Google Scholar as a regular search engine, this can be identified even at first glance. Yahoo.com provides users with the latest news on the economy, politics and even the latest gossip. This puts Yahoo.com at an advantage compared to Google.com. On top of that unlike Google, Yahoo.com has a whole list of links to other Yahoo websites for different categories organized alphabetically. For example:

• Addresses
  
• Auto
  
• Answers
  
• Finance
  
• Maps
  
• Music
  
• Yellow Pages 

Making your search for information easier and faster. One would not need to know the url to these individual sites as they would all be linked the the main, which is Yahoo.com. Again this is very much unlike the interface of Google, where you would need to know the url for Google Maps for example. 

http://maps.google.com/ 

Aside from that, for those who have Yahoo email accounts and are signed in, there is also a function on the Yahoo.com site that will give you a short summary of a user's most recent emails. This I find is very useful. 

Yahoo.com differs from Google Scholar in a sense that it is not necessarily for educational use only. By this I mean that one would not only find factual articles but also blogs and websites amongst other things when searching for a specific topic. All in all Yahoo.com is more for general use than it is restricted to a place for educational references. 

ahhh... with that said heres the uploaded picture requested :)