Web (Online) Research
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1. How to start your web research & Economics of Web Research
One of the questions you have to ask yourself right away before starting any search on Google or somewhere else is what quality you expect your research results to be. The Cost-Use-Time-Effort-Relation with regards to the quality of information to be found is crucial. So while you don't mind the accuracy of a Wikipedia research for initial research or some private things, it might not be accurate enough or even acceptable for your academic or professional work. In the case of Wikipedia, which is a fantastic tool to quickly get started on a topic, it is crucial to understand that this is in no case an acceptable resource e.g. for an academic paper. Nevertheless you might find a lot of resource links that accompany those texts. So you have to ask yourself from the beginning three main important things:
- What do you want to know?
- How exactly/ detailed do you want to research?
- How important is it to get the answer in the quality wanted?
The next step is then to define of where you could find the bits and pieces of information that you are looking for. Depending on what you are looking for you need only little, in some cases you have to go rather deep and need to get to know as much as possible about a topic. So you have to consider four different places/ tools that can help you to get ahead:
- Meta Search Engines (Wikipedia Definition), searching search engines.
- Subject Directories . Index of Websites, sorted in categories thematically.
- Search Engines in the likes of Google ... and others.
- Link collections/ Specialized Databases. Private/ public sites with links to specified topics.
Meta Search Engines, search in search engines and provide "their" results. They can save you some time, but too often you get way too many "hits". But some of them help you to specifiy and filter further within their site, which makes them quite helpful. They quickly and superficially search several individual search engines at once and return results compiled into a (sometimes) convenient format. They only catch about 10% of the search engines they visit . A few examples for Meta Search Engines are:
- DogPile.com (comfortable with a few additional functions)
- Clusty.com, formerly Vivisimo.com (clusters the search results in groups, very useful)
- Mamma.com (Intelligent meta search engine, very easy to use)
- HotBot.com (searches ask.com and msn.com)
- KartOO.com (providing a "mapped-out" overview, of search results, interesting but so far not very usable)
Subject Directories are indexes of links and documents put together by organizations that are specailizing in a particular topic. The "results" there are sorted in categories thematically. This not only provides a fantastic quick and first overview, but in some cases it is also just enough for what you are looking for. These "catalogues" are quite often maintained by an industry association, university department or individual companies. They are often carefully evaluated and kept up-to-date, but not always that frequently particularly if they are large and of more general nature. Examples of those are:
- LookSmart.com (wide offerings, deliver to search engines and portals)
- EuroSeek.com (specalized in European Documents, now powered by Google)
- Answers.com (access to topics from various sources, e.g. publishers etc.)
Search Engines are "information retrieval systems", as defined by Wikipedia. Everyone today knows Google, but there are a lot more out there, with some of them actually quite useful. One of the big drawbacks of the "general" search engine is, that basically most people don't know how to use them effectively and getting thereby relatively easy frustrated using them.
- Google.com (or .de, .uk, .ca, .fr etc.) (no comment, simply fantastic)
- AllTheWeb.com (an alternative, also very good results)
- Altavista.com (one more)
Link collections and/ or Specialised Databases can be part of company websites, websites of university departments or on websites of individuals. Quite often specified blogs to a particular topic can also contain a lot of links that can guide you further in your research.
- Bibliography Databases, e.g. Hvar.is (only accessible from Iceland) it provides free online access to an amazing number of online scientific, business, legal, technology publications and much more.
- Lexica, the classic one would be Wikipedia.org, and while it is not useable as an academic resource, it is nevertheless a fantastic starting point. It provides you with a quick overview and definition of things you are looking for and often provides you with valuable links in the resources section of the wikipedia article.
All of these possible resources for your research have their advantages and disadvantages and it really depends on what exactly you are looking for. You can loose yourself in all of them quite easily, so it helps to specifiy exactly what you are looking for. If you have a clear idea, you can then evaluate what tool or option would be the best solution. If time is of essence, Google might be a good start from a search engine perspective, but if quality is important, a search engine can guide you quickly to "web catalogues" or "link collections" of e.g. an industry association that covers what you are looking for.
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