Searching the Web

Web Based Search: Genghis Kahn

For my web based search I chose to study the life of Genghis Khan; the leader of the largest empire the world has ever seen. I decided to use Lycos as my search provider. I used Lycos because I've heard that it is a very reputable site yet I had never used it before. I was very pleased with the results I received, not only were the search results accurate within the first 10 hits provided, but I also found useful information within the first 25 sites provided.

The keywords I used to find my results were initially, “Genghis Khan”, and although these results were very helpful I found that by narrowing my search using, “The life of Genghis Khan” I reduced my number of hits by over 200,000 results. An odd note to mention is that when I refined my search, my second hit presented was the least helpful of my top 10 results. This was because the search focused on the Phrase, “the life of Genghis Khan”. After seeing this, Lycos found an article titled, “a timeline of the life of Genghis Khan.”, which only focused on a very broad overview of Khans life and accomplishments.

Just as an experiment I tested the exact same search on Google, which is my regular search engine. I was shocked to find that Google turned up over 800,000 more results than Lycos, however the top 10 search results we much less helpful than those provided by Lycos. This just goes to show that it’s about quality over quantity, and I believe I may have found a new search provider.