Searching the Web - My Experiences

I started by using the whole title of my study as a form of catch all. Beginning my search exercise with search engines - Google and it's sister academic site Google Scholar and meta search engines - Vivisimo and iZito. On iZito, using the "Nigerian media usage of the internet and other ICTs" did not come up with any result.

By removing the quotation marks, and using the texts 'Nigerian media use of internet and other ICTs' all the meta search engines returned over 70,000 entries.

Further search with the advanced search facilities on iZito and Google, using the exact phrase 'internet usage', however reduced the entry to about 7,000. Without the word 'south africa' , I was able to further reduced it to a manageable 28 entries.

I found that too much so I later narrowed it down to ‘ICT usage + Nigeria ' which came down to under 9,000 entries for the mata search engines and 150,000 by general search engines like Google. But significantly less than 1000 in the academic search engine Google Scholar.

Further narrowing it down to "ICT usage in Nigeria", with the quotation marks, finally achieved a definitive return of one entry.

Using subject portals such as Artifacts, i was able to get a more narrow down and highly useful resources relating to news media research and Journalism criticism and lists of specialists searching databases for journalism, but a few in terms of my specific research topic.

While not saying the way i had gone about it is the best, I would recommend that one should start from a general topic and narrow it down gradually. Also it would be better to use the search engines, especially the meta search engines first to build up information about the subject before going on to use the specialised subject gateways.

Last Updated: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 10:47 AM

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