Reflection for Week 6

Sorry guys for the late post.

For this week lesson, I have learnt about invisible web (databases) which is referred to as Deep Web. It contains text pages, files and high-quality authoritative information available via the World Wide Web that general purpose search engines cannot or will not add to their indices of the Web pages. An example of an invisible web is the TP's Digital Library Portal website. It requires password from the TP staffs and students to access to the information. The information cannot be accessed through general purpose search engine.

I have explored and learnt how to make use of the TP’s databases. A few of them are EBSCOhost, Factiva and Newslink. The uses of EBSCOhost are quite similar to the search engines. It has categories to navigate to the different topics. The search results generated from the EBSCOhost have high relevance to my research topic. Most importantly, information from the EBSCOhost were mainly journal articles which were detailed as I am able to view the full text documents. However, the results generated from the Factiva and Newslink, which provides me with the newspaper articles were useless as it did not provide me with relevant results based on my research topic.

I think that it is more effective to search for resources using the databases rather than using search engines because I do not have to worry about the reliability of the information in the databases as they were from worthy sources. Furthermore, it is not time-consuming to get useful information as most of the search results found were relevant to my research topic.

I would consider using invisible web (databases) for my own respective diploma if I really need to find more information than I had gathered from searching the different search engines, meta search engines and subject directories. Other than that, I would still prefer using meta search engines such as MetaCrawler to find information related to my research topic.

For my Wiki experience, I am able to learn some useful information regarding on my relevant topic shared by others from the EIR Wiki. It is useful for me because I can also share my own point of view with the others and they can also get to know some useful information.