2.1 Introduction 18
2.2.5 Higher Education and Online World 28
2.2.5.2 Search Engines 33
According to Chakravarty and Randhawa (2006) search engines help researchers sift out academic documents pertinent to their field of study by using electronic searching resources that are user friendly, simple, and offer search velocity and broad coverage. Given the extensive use of search engines as a tool for online learning identified thus far, two academic search engines have been selected to further elaborate on the literature. These include Scirus and Google.
Scirus is an internet search tool created particularly for the retrieval of scientific information (Chakravarty & Randhawa, 2006). It has been developed specifically for scientists, researchers, and students to single-out the information required, such as patent information, peer-reviewed articles, author home pages and university web sites. Scirus offers a host of innovative features:
more than 250 million science related pages, scientific technical and medical data on the web, latest reports, articles and journals that other search engines might omit, and unique functionalities designed for scientists and researchers (Chakravarty & Randhawa, 2006). This serves as a draw card for students who want to quickly access scientific material that is credible.
A student has the option of a basic or advanced search, depending on the nature of the research.
The Scirus search engine is implemented because it allows students to pinpoint information they need by: selecting the area of scientific research; narrow the search to a particular author, journal or article; restrict the results to a specified date range; find scientific conferences, abstracts, and patents; and refine, customise and save the searches made (Chakravarty & Randhawa, 2006). It is for these special features that students access Scirus and find the use of search engines worthwhile.
Amidst the myriad of search engines available on the web, Google possesses the lion’s share of search traffic and is highly regarded as the foundation of any search engine marketing program (Ingeniux Corporation, 2010). Google represents a user friendly search engine based on free-text searching of the content of public web pages (Brophy & Bawden, 2005). Google is further extended into Google Scholar (access to non-copyright academic material), Google print (searching the digitised full text of printed books from publishers, book sellers or libraries), and Google ventures (Brophy & Bawden, 2005). Amongst these, Google Scholar serves as a valuable resource for scholarly literature with students of higher education (Chakravarty &
Randhawa, 2006). Google Scholar offers the retrieval of information in many disciplines, fields of study and sources that include peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles from professional societies, universities, academic publishers, preprint repositories and other scholarly organisations (Chakravarty & Randhawa, 2006). Articles are ranked by weighting the full text of each article, the author and the publication in which the article appears, and whether it has been cited by other scholarly literature.
Users of Google are able to restrict their search to PDF files, PowerPoint files, Word documents or Excel documents by adding a file type to the search query (Spencer, 2006). Yet users have expressed dissatisfaction with the performance of existing search engines, which frequently return several documents in response to a user query (Wen et al, 2001). These search engines attempt to ‘understand’ a user’s question by suggesting similar questions that other people have asked for which the system has a correct answer (Brewer, 2005). However the queries outlined by users are somewhat different, both in form and intention, and these results in the user’s discontent with the search engine. A contemporary search engine deals with over 3 billion documents, involving 10TB of data, and handles approximately 150 million queries daily (Brewer, 2005). In retrospect queries may be short, but there are more than 10 million different words in almost all languages (Brewer, 2005). The challenge then exists in tracking and ranking 10 million distinct words in 3 billion documents. Associated with this are the limited words students submit in queries and therefore thousands of hits are returned and ranking these can be problematic.
The language of the target document is crucial as this depends upon whether a person can comprehend the search results (Lewandowski, 2008). Search engines consider language factors when the result sets for a certain query are the same, e.g. in the German and the English versions of Google in which the rankings may be different. Lewandowski (2008) suggests that language factors are imperative to determine the degree to which a person can be satisfied in retrieving the document anticipated. It is pertinent to consider the issue of language in this study as South African universities and colleges contain a diverse cohort of students who speak different languages (Hodgkinson-Williams, 2009), and this has an implication on their ability to successfully use a search engine.
Problems relating to the use of search engines also include ‘search engine spam’ where some web authors purposely manipulate their placement in the ranking order of various search engines, with the intention that their documents be retrieved first (Henzinger, Motwani &
Silverstein, 2002). This relies on the notion that users of the web tend to analyse only the first page of search results, so usually the top 10 results are displayed on this page. Although problems exist in the implementation of search engines as a resource tool, Martzoukou (2008) contends that overall students of tertiary level are satisfied with the performance of search engines and themselves as information seekers. Martzoukou (2008) advises that in areas where students find difficulty in using a search engine, attention needs to be focused on developing information-seeking tactics and other strategies to better assist. This further requires a deeper analysis of the effectiveness of students’ use of search engines for learning which this study hopes to give perspective on for informed practise as a learning aid.