I will be looking at different search engines in order to find the information that I am looking for. The information that I am going to be researching is house price data. I’m going to compare 3 search engines to see which one is most appropriate in what I’m looking for. Text based search engine: For this section I’m going to use Google as the text based search engine. In my personal experience many people use Google as their primary search engine. I’m going to search house price data in Google’s search bar and see what results I get back from it. The index returned 125,000,000 hits relating to my topic. Directory search engine:
For the directory search, I will be using the live search to see what results I get from the topic that I am researching. The results from the search came back with 67,200,000 hits relating to my topic. Meta search engine: For this section I’m going to use ask. com search engine. Ask. com is a little different from the other two search engines because it allows you to actually type a question in e. g. ‘how do you build a website’ this will return a list of reference related to building a website which I feel is good. I’m going to research the same topic as I did in the other two search engines and see what results I get.
The result from this search engine is that I received 4,477,000 hits relating to house price data. As you can see from the three different searches I did with different search engines, all of them came back with different results. Google had the most results relating to the house price data. So the most appropriate search engine for me is the text base search which is Google. Using logical operators (AND, OR, NOT) Logical operators are AND, OR and NOT. These are used to add precision to searches that people make when using a search engine. Using the AND operator narrows down the search.
When you add more words to it the narrower the search becomes. The OR operator widens the search. In the Google search engine it isn’t necessary to enter the word AND between search words because Google includes all the search terms entered by default. Google also uses the minus sign to represents the NOT operator. This is another way of adding precision to searches. The advanced search is offered by many search engines, the search engine that I am going to be looking for the advanced search option is Google. Some of the options in Google’s search engine are the same as using the logical operators which I have stated above.
The option ‘with all the words’ is the same as the AND operator. The option ‘with at least one of the words’ is the same as using the OR operator and the ‘without the words’ is the same as using the NOT operator. As you can see from the screen shot I have taken, I used the Google’s advanced search in order to find what I am looking for. The option ‘with all these words’ I entered in house price and data again this is the same as using the AND operator for the logical operators. I also entered the word ‘excel’ in the option ‘one or more of these words’ again this is the same as the OR operator.
In the option with ‘any of these unwanted words’ I put ‘news’ many of hits relating to my topic comes back with news so to narrow down the search I didn’t want any aspects relating to news. I found a link which was the nationwide website; it has data relating to house prices. The nationwide website is an on-line database which has its own Internal search engine. When a user has entered the site, the site offers a range of different options to choose from as shown below in the screen shot: As you can see from the screenshot it has three options that are drop down boxes. I used the ‘UK series’ option and chose data from 1952.
I chose this data because it has accurate data from the past 50 years and has long range data which can be analysed. The data that I downloaded from this on-line database was in Microsoft excel. House Price Data in Excel: As you can see from the screen shot the data is set out in four different sections which I have highlighted on in the screenshot. The first section is all houses, the second section is the new houses, third section is modern houses and the fourth is older houses. I will be using different functions in order to do some analysis to this data. I created a graph using the data I got from the spreadsheet.
I took every forth column for the first 10 years to generate some analysis. As I stated above the nationwide data had four sections one of which I did a graph on in the screenshot above. I decided to take every ‘Q4’ of the three sections and compare them. I compared ‘new houses’ with the ‘modern houses’ and the ‘old houses’. Again I only took the years from 1952 to 1961 because of the large amount of data within the nationwide. As you can see from the screenshot on the right the three different house sections are quite close together. The ‘New houses’ has the best increase then the other two.