This is the first EIR lesson in 2010. Today Haziq and i were late for class due to traffic jam. Today we were taught how to search for information this sound easy but i find it confusing. My topic is Discuss the impact of problem gambling amongst youth. People would just paste the topic in google and they need to find the relevant website from the 20 result page. They will waste a few hours looking for materials ao we were taught of how to search information effectively. I would use my topic as example.

(Impace OR Effect*) AND (Problem OR Issue*) AND (Gambling) AND (Youths* OR Teens*)

It really save my time finding a relevant website and it reduce the result page to 4. Within one hour i could find alot of information from forums,blog or some organisational website. There is a search engine provided by google where u could search about scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including these, books, abstracts and articles. It is call Google Scholar

The pictures below is print screens of my search result.Tml lesson at 10!!! Tml we will learn about something call meta search engine.

My Blog Reflection 1

1) Were you impressed by Google's search function/features? Why?

Google is no longer stranger to me since i was in primary school. Whenever i need to research on certain things, the first website i went would be google. During that time I was impressed by the simple layout of google compared to other search engine like yahoo, msn and even now i still prefer the layout of google.

After entering EIR, I was more impressed by Google's function/features.Google Search provides more than 22 special features beyond the original word-search capability. These include synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, and sports scores. There are special features for numbers including prices, temperatures, money/unit conversions, calculations, patents, area codes, and language translation. A Google search-results page is ordered by a priority rank called a "PageRank" which is kept secret to avoid spammers from forcing their pages to the top thus we can find relevant information on the top page on Google.

This is quoted from Google:
"Have in mind though that even very advanced searchers, such as the members of the search group at Google, use these features less than 5% of the time. Basic simple search is often enough. As always, we use square brackets [ ] to denote queries, so [ to be or not to be ] is an example of a query; [ to be ] or [ not to be ] are two examples of queries."

You could see Google is so powerful that evern search group at google use the feature less than 5% of the time.

2) How do you feel about participation in discussion forum? Is it helpful for your research? Do you feel anxious about talking to others you do not know?

I feel good in participating in dicussion forum because I can see other people's point of view and thier life experiences which widen my research. If someone joins the discussion forum means they are curious/interested about the topic. I would feel excited rather than anxious to talk to them about my point of view in that particular topic.

3)Why must you do citation and bibliography?

From wikipedia
"A prime purpose of a citation is intellectual honesty; to attribute to other authors the ideas they have previously expressed, rather than give the appearance to the work's readers that the work's authors are the original wellsprings of those ideas."

What i do above is a citation because the text is taken from wikipedia and not written by me. In short, citation is a act of respecting other people's works which you use for your own use.

Bibliography is a list of citation in alphabetical order

Labels: Google, Reflections