Meta search engine? Search Directory?

Hi everyone

In this post, i am going to introduce 2 different search engine. So what are the other search engine do you know that are available other than Google and Yahoo? Some of you might say Bing. Well what else besides that? Anyone know?

I am going to show you what is call a meta search engine. I am not sure if you have heard about it before but i would like to call it the "Power search engine" as it is a search engine which searches the search engine. what you i mean by that you might ask. Meta search engine is a search engine where by you input your search topic into the search bar and it will search other search engine and compile it together. 1 example of a meta search engine is MetaCrawler.

 The above picture is the home page of a Meta search engine from metacrawler.com. However, this search engine does not allow you to search it specifically like what i have posted last week about how to search the search engine specifically by using AND/ OR and also brackets.

Next search engine that i am going to introduce is called the Search Directory. As the name speaks for itself, the website have it's own directory where by it separates you search into more specific type like sport, world, game and many more. so if you were to search about games, just click on games and it will specify on the different types of games. So for my topic on Genetically Modified Food, i would have to go to Science>Agriculture>Biotechnology> Genetically Modified Plant or Corn and Maize.

The above search directory is from google.

So if i were to select a search engine among the 2 that i have just introduced, i would definitely go for the meta search engine. It not just gives small results, it also give me relevant results from different search engine and it saves lots of time as i only have to search it once on the meta search engine rather than to go all the search engine to search for the same topic.

SecondLife

Hi

Today i have when online to second life, a virtual world. I am supposed to do some virtual online shopping, using the list of shopping places/islands and the one place that i chose was MIA (Men In Action). At the start, i find it very difficult to control the avatar and to move around the island and the places like using the world map. However after a while i got used to it and found it quite good as it is very user friendly and almost life real-life. Although it lags a lot and causes the building in the screen to seem like a patch here and there and causes the avatar to walk or fly without controlling it, i still think that it is still very good as it provides with with all our basic needs like clothes and others.

Firstly i visited a shop in MIA called A Wild Hair. This shop provide a lot of hair styles for my avatar and most of the hair styles are the types that i wanted to style my hair with. I am very happy with it as it could happen to my avatar but not for me in reality as i am not able to style my hair in that way as it is either too short or my hair is to oily with mean that no matter how much hair wax i use it would not work.

Sadly, for this to happen to my avatar, it would cost me L$ 699 or some would say 699 linden dollars. Which would mean it cost about US$3.03 .

Next, i walked around MIA, i came across this sign and it says that there is a new free shop and i right clicked on it to teleport to that area. Speaking of teleport, i find that the teleport function in Second Life is very useful as we do not have to walk or fly to the area or even click on a icon to get to the area we desire. The teleport function becomes personal and not share which would have chances of the server to lag.

After teleporting to the free shop, i was quite surprised with the variety of things that they have there and it is all for free. Firstly i brought thing dragon arm chair found on the ground floor of the area. It looks very stylish yet old, somewhat like an antique.

Next i went into a shop where it is also located at the free shop area. Sadly it does not have a shop name but at the front it says MIA Island.

Inside there, there are even more things that are very attractive although the environment in there looks very rundown or like what we know as a multi-storey carpark.

 Inside there, they sell stylish clothes and lots more like cars, furniture and more.

Like the picture below, they have clothes like business tuxedo or leather pants for sales and it is free of charge.

 Next, we have the car.

The above shows the cars that are for sale that are also free of charge like the first picture is a manual drive convertible and on the second picture is a Cadillac and a Nissan GTR.

Then on my way out, i managed to meet this woman who is from New York. She is also about the same age group as in exploring the virtual world. I am excited that with this Second Life Virtual World, i am able to connect with people from other country which makes this world smaller. I am happy to be able to make friends with people online such as this virtual reality world.

This virtual shopping is much better than the E-shopping spree as in this virtual world, i am able to buy much more things and some of it are free although i am not able to use it in reality but however, in this virtual world, i means non-stop shopping for me and with the same amount of money in reality that i spend, i am about to buy much more in this virtual world than i can i reality. This is an experience which is very good in my own opinion.

EIR Practical 3

Hi

I am really glad that i have attended this lesson as i felt that the lesson that i have learnt today would most probably be the best that i could have learnt in EIR as in today's lesson, i learnt about bibliography and also internet search.

When i say internet search, it doesn't mean that typing the word in the search bar and hitting the enter/search button. i meant that how to search the internet more specifically on the topic that you are looking for. For example, my topic is <Discuss the trends and developments of the genetically modified food industry.>. If i were to put the whole question into the search bar, it would give me a lot of results and at least 50% of them are irrelevant. So to scale down the search results to make it more accurate, i was taught how to substitute words to and to use inverted commas to group the words together so as to make the search more accurate and to make it accurate. So my search would look like this < Trends AND development AND "GM food" AND industry> or < (Trends OR Pattern) AND (development OR future) AND "GM food" AND (industry OR society). So in this way, my search in Google that might initially be 150million results would be scaled down to maybe 5million results.

Next is bibliography. Another word for bibliography is citation. It is very important to cite where you get your information from, who, and also when. Without doing so, you might be deemed as plagiarism. So in today's lesson i am also taught how to do a bibliography. There are also certain ways in doing this citation and not just stating the website on where you get your information from. In bibliography, we have to cite the author's name, date of publication, retrieved date and the url. And all of them have to be in order and if there are multiple citations, it also have to be in alphabetical order.

E-shopping Spree~~IF i have $500.

If i have $500, i would like to buy myself some branded clothes from Hugo Boss.

 This is one of their T-shirts that i would like to buy. It cost about $50gbp which is about $100 sgd. This T-shirt is made of 100% cotton and it is a V-neck tee.
Another thing that i would like to buy is a pair of shoes which looks like this.

This pair of shoes is also from Hugo Boss. This pair of shoe cost about $110gbp which is also about $225sgd. This pair of shoe only comes in one colour and it is made of leather. It have a combination of shiny leather which are also soft.

I would also like to buy another watch from Casiao Edifice. This is the model EF-539D. This watch only cost $99 and it looks stylish and sporty. It have a one second stopwatch capable of measuring to 11'59'59. It is also water resistant.

I think that the purpose of the website that i have visited are that the internet not only provides us with information, we can also buy things online or to check out the things that we want to buy online. Not only that, we can also use various ways to look for all of the things that we want to buy and to search different sites to look for the things that we want that might be similar but cheaper.

What i have learn

Hi everyone,

In class today, the topic that i have selected to do my research on is < Discuss the trends and developments of the genetically modified food industry >.

I have learnt that during internet research, information can be found everywhere. I learnt that information can not only be found on wiki but in a lot more websites on the internet rather than the usual input of question on the google search bar and click on the first link which usually leads to wiki.

Information could be found on organizational websites like the government sites or even in blogs where people can put in their own opinion backing it up with their research. EIR also taught me that despite that there are so make places to get information, not necessary that all the websites that we go to, the information are always relevant to our research or in simple words rubbish/junk.

Information from organizational websites are more informative in answer what it is and what is it about about GM food. However, for blogs or journal, it is more about personal opinion like criticism or what is so good about them that they dislike or like about them back up by some of their research. Wikipedia is another source of information but i personally think that the information used from there should be used carefully as it might be biased as it is a place where people can edit and add information to it.

That is all for my second post. ^^