Sunday, January 7, 2007

Boolean Searching

Most Hits

Results 1 - 10 of about 2,750,000,000 for advanced OR internet OR users . (0.13 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 318,000,000 for advanced AND internet AND users . (0.06 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 122,000,000 for advanced internet users . (0.04 seconds)

cleary from the results achieved the first query of "advanced OR internet OR users" returned the most hits. This is because the search is searching for all those terms, either advanced, internet or users.

searching for pages that strictly relate to the subject of advanced internet users would bring the number of hits down but the information would be more relevant.

Skills Based Information

After reading some comments in the discussion board i still don't really know what skills based is referring to i have used google.com and searched the following

Results 1 - 10 of about 155,000 for advanced AND internet AND users AND skills-based. (0.40 seconds)

I don't really know how useful it is, but hey i found some net11 blogs, which was helpful to me, becuase they also did not know what was skills-based meant as well :)

University

Results 1 - 10 of about 58,300,000 for advanced AND internet AND users AND university. (0.21 seconds)

This returned back information from a number of universities, although not all hits returned were from university sites, a lot were.

I tried searching subject directory search engines as well for example
http://bubl.ac.uk/link/linksearch.cfm

but i could not achieve good results with this, the hits were too broad and not all of them were from university sites.

Results 1 - 10 of about 810,000 for advanced AND internet AND users. (0.16 seconds)
using http://www.studentnow.com/collegelist/searchuniversities.html
all results returned were from .edu (university sites) but alot of the information was irrelevant.

overall the best way i think would be to do advanced AND internet AND users AND university
then you would have to pick out the best results.

Or i noticed on another blog, that they were searching +edu.au which would return all the universities in Australia.


edit: thanks to a dear member in the discussion boards they have enlightened me to the fact that to find sites strictly from universites to add the keyword site: edu.au


for example advanced internet users site:edu.au


this will return only sites that have specified domain.





1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi Nicholas,

I found this blog entry while doing my own Boolean searching task. Thanks for the site:edu tip you mention, it was very helpful.

I have mentioned you in my learning log. I hope you don't mind.

Kathy T