Internet Research Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Internet Research - Essay Example It is even easier and more economical to a certain extent to surf the internet than to go to a public library to search for books. The internet allows you to search and use information at the safety and comfort of your own home or office. The internet also offers a wide array of means to search for data. There are a variety of search engines available for use to cater to whatever your need is. For the purpose of determining if internet research is really very helpful and sufficient in acquiring data for a specific study or topic, I have employed internet research as the primary and the only data gathering methodology for answering the question: Is the population of the UK healthier than it was 5 or 10 years ago. The initial part of my research plan is to come up with topics or questions related to the health of the UK population. These topics would help me find answers to the main question. I then chose three search engines: www.Google.com for the web-crawler type, www.Dogpile.com for the meta-search type and www.UKwizz.com for the one category based type. I had a difficulty with the one category based search engine because I was not able to immediately figure out the better choice between a health specific search engine and a country or geography specific search engine. ... I know that the search results are heavily dependent on the search topics or criteria. The way in which the subject is entered in the search box has a lot of weight because the search engines are also greatly dependent on key words in order to search for accurate matches. I had scrapped topics like the increase or decrease of insurance health claims in the UK, and the increase or decrease of pharmaceutical medicine sales in the UK. The insurance health claims subject returned useless sites where most of the sites involved insurance companies and their policies. On the other hand, the medicine sales search subject resulted to consumer sites offering medicines and websites of pharmaceutical companies. I came up with four reasonable topics which I used to search for information I needed to check whether the UK population now is healthier than five or ten years before. The topics were: UK Population Health Trends, UK Health Campaigns, UK Mortality rate and New Human Diseases in UK. I initially planned on using questions as search subjects but decided not to after a certain number of tries. I discovered that the more words you include in the statement you put in the search box, the less accurate the results generated are. This is because the engine looks at every word in the statement entered and generates hits involving the most number of words, which it saw in the statement. These words may not be in order. It is the most number of word combinations that the engine looks for. Since the words are not in order, then the essence or meaning of the statement relating to the generated result is oftentimes not related to the topic being searched for. I chose Google as my web crawler search engine mainly