Searching for information on the Internet can be taxing. There are many different search engines that can be used to provide you with the information you are looking for. Some search engines work better than others leaving you to do more research. Google, LexisNexis and AltaVista were all helpful in researching the popular medium Facebook.
Like I mentioned before the search engines that I used were Google, AltaVista and LexisNexis. I decided to use these for different reasons. Using Google was the obvious choice because it is one of the most widely used sites around the world. AltaVista was used because I have never used it before and I wanted to try it out. The last one that I used was AltaVista, which is an academic search engine/database. I used this site because during my research I found a lot of information that connected to Facebook.
In order to do research on a topic through these search engines/databases you will need to use keywords. Keywords enable you to narrow down the information that you are looking for. The keywords that I used were “Facebook”, “What is Facebook?”, “Mark Zuckerberg” and “the history of Facebook.” Although each of these keywords is slightly different from one another, when I typed them in most of the results that back came were the same.
I found various results upon typing in these different keywords. The first thing I did was go to Google.com and type in “Facebook” the first thing that came up was facebook.com. Then, I found crunchbase.com which provided a company profile of the site. The New York Times wrote an article about Facebook. These results were all found on page 1 of over 583 million results. Once I got to the second page I decided to change the keyword. I then typed in “What is Facebook”, this resulted in irrelevant information. Most of what I found was self-definitions about Facebook. I found this information on blogs; one in particular was by someone named MOBIZ. Then I decided to try the keyword “Mark Zuckerberg”, the creator of Facebook, his Wikipedia page was the first result. The next thing that popped up was the Forbes list of world billionaires. The next thing that I looked at was the executive bios on the Facebook site. This provided a list of the people who own and operate the site.
The next search engine I took a look at was AltaVista. I typed in “facebook” and most of the results that I found were the same ones that I found in Google. Then I typed in “the history of facebook” and it was the same effect as before, these were results that I found on Google. I decided to reword it and I typed in “facebook history.” I found an article in Rolling Stone magazine that detailed a battle over who actually created Facebook. Under the same keyword I found a short article about a Facebook movie being produced by Aaron Sorkin.
The last search engine that I used was LexisNexis. LexisNexis is an academic database and it provided me with a lot of useful information. I typed in the primary keyword “facebook.” When I entered that a large amount of results were produced. This database allows you to sort your results by publication date. I sorted it by relevance first and then I tried publication date. When I did that an article about Facebook ads and how they are targeting Facebook users came up. I also found a Washington Post article about Facebook and narcissism.
Using these search engines I was given the opportunity to see what each one had to offer. I found that the Google search was most effective. I admit that I have a biased towards AltaVista and LexisNexis because Google is the most popular of the three. Google has a reputation of being a really good search engine. I used many different keywords, but I think “facebook” was the most effective. When I typed this in for each search engine this produced the most results. It would make sense that this would have a lot of results because that is the only term that has to be searched. Using the other ones such as “what is” or “the history” of Facebook gives the search engine permission to look for things with those entire phrase in it or just “the” or “what is.” It was hard finding a lot of things on Mark Zuckerberg because the results were showing information on other Mark Zuckerbergs who were not the creators of Facebook.
Some of the sources that I found were useful and others were not. When you are looking for information online, there are some criteria that should be followed to determine the quality (Tensen, 2004). The sources that I found that I would use again are Facebook.com, New York Times, Forbes.com, Rolling Stone Magazine, and the article that I found on LexisNexis by Newsweek. I would use these again because these are credible sources and they have good reputations. The publication dates are also updated and recent. The sources that I would not use again are Wikipedia, Mobiz, and Mashable.com. I would not use these because they are not very reliable. Wikipedia and Mashable are similar because you can edit the information on both sites. When it comes to information being edited it is hard to know if you can trust it or not because since anyone can edit it, there may not be anyone moderating. MOBIZ is a blog so it is someone’s opinion and opinions vary from person to person and also the reputation for this blog can not be accounted for.
Searching for information on the Internet can be challenging. The challenge is finding useful and reliable information. Since the Internet has such high traffic you are bound to come across all sorts of things. When you are looking through this information it is important to evaluate each thing carefully, so that you are not using something that can make your work incredible.
Buffardi, Laura E. (2008). "Mirror, Mirror on the (Facebook) Wall" The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/custom/2008/10/10/CU2008101002890.html
Lyons, Daniel. (2008). "Facebook's Roar Becomes a Meow; Putting ads in front of Facebook users is like hanging out a party interrupting conversations to hawk merchandise." Newsweek, Enterprise; Techtonic Shifts; Pg. E22 Vol. 152 No. 16. http://www.newsweek.com/id/163120
Tensen, Bonnie L. (2004). Research strategies for a digital age (chapter 5). Boston: Wadsworth.
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