Why Search Engines and Databases Produce Different Types of Results

Living in the Information Age (SOS-110-OL) Writing Assignment 2 The difference between what evaluative and assessment information is provided by an Internet search using Google. com and a search using EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier Database is extremely different. I started my searches by open two different internet windows, Google on one and EBSCO on another. My Google search and EBSCO search was â€Å"articles on privacy and security on the internet†. The top result from Google was ftc. gov. This page had a list of three different microsites, two did not have any articles and the other one did. The article I found was on Malware. When I evaluate this article from the techniques from the Berkeley site, it does not rate well. It has no author and it does not cite any sources. The one plus it does have is that it is from a . gov site. Even though it does not rate well I do trust this site. The reason why I trust the site is because in the fifth step of the evaluation process, listen to your gut reaction. Think about why the page was created, the intentions of its author. My gut reaction tells me the information is coming from a government cite so I trust it. The purpose of this article was to inform and educate, there were no other intentions other than to inform and educate. My top result from EBSCO was an article from Communications of the ACM called Privacy and Security as Simple as Possible, But Not More So. The authors of this article are very creditable and qualified on the topic. This article was published to inform, give facts and some opinion. The article’s sources are document with footnotes throughout. Overall, this is a credible and useful source of information. It as creditable authors and all of the information was backed up with creditable sources. Like I said earlier the difference between what evaluative and assessment information is provided by an Internet search using Google. com and a search using EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier Database is extremely different. Search engines locate web pages that contain the keywords that the users entered. They also can find articles but it can be difficult to narrow down results. Like the search I just completed â€Å"articles on privacy and security on the internet† the search engines finds web pages not articles, so most of the information that came back from the search did not really pertain to what I was looking for. The database search on the other hand searched for actual articles that pertained to the subject that I was looking for, it is more organized and easier to access. Database much like the internet have massive amounts of data in which they can pull information but databases mainly will pull their articles from newspapers, magazines, journals and electronic reference sources so it is a more creditable source. Internet search engines and database searches can both provide good sources of information when doing searches. I found that the database search was more organize and had more information that pertained to my subject.