Question

Case Project 2: Search Tool Usage - at least 2 pages of content Interview at least five people who are familiar with the Internet. Ask them to describe the steps they take to find information on the Internet. Ask each person the following questions: What is your favorite search tool and why? How long have you been using this search tool? How long have you use a computer? Do you prefer a particular brand (such as the operating system used)? Is your use of computers mostly personal or business or both? Do you have any recommendations related to finding information on the Internet? View the search tool products that were mentioned in your interview. Provide a screen shot of each tool’s home page and your overall impression of the search tool including suggestions for each from your perspective. Include all sources on a separate reference page in APA format. Remember to cite your source and include all references.

Answer 1

Please rate the answer. Hopefully the content is more than 2 pages. In case short, please revert back via feedback comment and i shall elaborate the answers

Summary:- The question is about getting answers from atleast 5 different people wrt what search tool they use and why. Then we need to provide our view point on same

• View the search tool products that were mentioned in your interview.
• Provide a screen shot of each tool’s home page and your overall impression of the search tool including suggestions for each from your perspective.
• Include all sources on a separate reference page in APA format. Remember to cite your source and include all references =================================================================

Person_1

1. Describe the steps they take to find information on the Internet:- I use a search engine to find the content that i am looking for
2. What is your favorite search tool and why:- I mostly use Google search engine to do my search for academic as well as personal work. The reason is that i find it quite easy to use, the interface is very simple and it gives search results even if the internet speed is slow.
3. How long have you been using this search tool:- i have been using it for more than 18+ years now. When i got introduced to computer's i used to play only video games and my parents use to open the website for me. Later once i got hold of how things worked, i started using it (under parents guidance initially)
4. How long have you use a computer: close to 20+ years now
5. Do you prefer a particular brand (such as the operating system used): I work on Microsoft/Windows mostly as i find them easy to use and user friendly
6. Is your use of computers mostly personal or business or both: personal and work related activities. If you wish to put business under same categorty as work, then yes business also.
7. Do you have any recommendations related to finding information on the Internet:- i will really love to see lesser adv contents on the websites. May be a subscription based model can be introduced where when i search, no adv come on the pages. They take up some much space, eat bandwidth and are mostly not use to me.

Person_2

1. Describe the steps they take to find information on the Internet:- make use of search engine or ask my friends for specific website recommendations
2. What is your favorite search tool and why:- I make use of Bing and Google search. They work great for me. Mostly i use bing
3. How long have you been using this search tool:- dont recall, never thought about that. I guess ever since i am using computers.
4. How long have you use a computer:- hmm close to 31 years, i got introduced to computers back in 1990 some time (in our 6th grade, BASIC programming language was taught to us)
5. Do you prefer a particular brand (such as the operating system used): Windows mostly. Though ocassionaly i use Linux also
6. Is your use of computers mostly personal or business or both: Both. It's difficult to separate the 2 now :D
7. Do you have any recommendations related to finding information on the Internet:- It's great to have the extension that we have in browsers now, they help to add much more information to what we get via simple search. My concern is mostly for safety/phising/website spoofing. We need to have better security in built in the search engines and also more functionaly which will not make me install extensions

Person_3

1. Describe the steps they take to find information on the Internet:- i start by asking people, once i get some idea then i do a search on the Internet
2. What is your favorite search tool and why:- If i have a PC nearby then google search works great. On mobile i use Safari browser
3. How long have you been using this search tool:- Safari close to 5+ years now. Google much longer than that, i think close to 20+ years
4. How long have you use a computer:- i have been playing games on Computer since age 3, that will make it close to 26 years now.
5. Do you prefer a particular brand (such as the operating system used): i have worked on DOS and then many version of Windows (95, NT, 98, ME, XP etc). These days it is Windows 7 ... so you can say Microsoft mostly.
6. Is your use of computers mostly personal or business or both:- At this age it is both.
7. Do you have any recommendations related to finding information on the Internet:- the relevance of the content can be made more specific. I am not sure how the search algorithm works, and i hardly browse beyond the first page ... i always wonder what am i missing on the 7th/8th pages ... what content wesbites are listed there. Can the way the information is presened on the webpage be changed eg in columns format. After all, we get to see the contents only after the web page opens up ... on google search page the details i hardly read

Person_4

1. Describe the steps they take to find information on the Internet: I do search mostly for my research work. To start with i gather the data from the research papers that i am reading and then i look for the relevant content online
2. What is your favorite search tool and why:- Google search works for me. And i have not tried any other search engine to be frank
3. How long have you been using this search tool: 28+ years or so
4. How long have you use a computer: 35 years
5. Do you prefer a particular brand (such as the operating system used): i have worked onLinux machines since beginning, as the OS was for free and for my research work the work is done mostly inLInux environment
6. Is your use of computers mostly personal or business or both: mostly for work/business. Personal work is vey little ... looking for online shopping etc. I am not into facebook etc. Twitter and linked in are more for me
7. Do you have any recommendations related to finding information on the Internet:- for my work it works great, i type in the keywords and voila there are all the recent publications links. Since my work is very specific i do not think that it can be enhanced in any manner via search engine, i need to actually open and read the papers before landing on the relevant one

Person_5

1. Describe the steps they take to find information on the Internet: make use of search engine, via social engineering
2. What is your favorite search tool and why: i ake use of TOR browser mostly. I download a lot of content from torrent websites, as such i am always very careful of my IP address details etc. So as a precautionary measure i make use of TOR browser mostly
3. How long have you been using this search tool: i got into using Tor browser for close to 3 years ago. Before that it was google via chrome browser only (ocassionally on firefox browser)
4. How long have you use a computer: close to 15 years
5. Do you prefer a particular brand (such as the operating system used): I am equally comfortable with windows and linux. Some times i use macbook
6. Is your use of computers mostly personal or business or both: mostly for study related work. few times for online shopping
7. Do you have any recommendations related to finding information on the Internet:- Information is esy to find if we know what we are looking for (via the keywords). But if we need to start from scratch .. then it can take some time and also do lot of research. The problem which i face is that, there is so much content there on the Internet that a lot of time goes away in finding the relevant content (this is for when we are doing search from scratch). But as mentioned, if you know what you are looking for, then it is quite easy to get that

Provide a screen shot of each tool’s home page and your overall impression of the search tool including suggestions for each from your perspective

Screenshots of the Google, safari, firefox, Tor browsers are attached. I have tried to capture these in generic way so that no region specific images are captured. If the images do not suit the purpose, request you to capture as per ther egion where you are residing

My Suggestions/view point wrt the above interviews conducted:- Different age group people were interviewed, keeping in mind their profession also so as to add diversity to the answers and that no default pattern gets set. While we do get to see a variety of opinion wrt nature of search and the way the search is carried out, one thing that i note is that ... after the first step of search, it was very much requried to narrow down the search results via doing through the results page. It can be called luck also, that people find in first go what they were looking for (unless they are not looking for something very specific eg say an ebook in a particular format only). Few people made use of extensions to do that, others went through each website to zero on what they wanted.

Almost everyone made use of Google in some way (though the browsers used differed depending on the OS used). Also no one talked about the inbuilt security features of the browsers or how the settings can be enhanced to help in the search eg voice search, image search, changing the language, disabling cookies, deleting history, stopping wesbites from tracking etc (though Firefox appeared to be the only browser which taled about tracking protection openly, other browsers also have it, but do not talk about that) . Most people were satisfied with the default settings and carried on from there.

It appears that the advanced features of the browsers are unknown to most of the people and due to the design of the interface, they are sledom used by anyone (rarely anyone bothers to click the 'options'/settings option). No one bothers or wants to learn how to make effective use of search engine.

It can be summarized that the way the 'search engines' are designed is working for most of the people, the advance options that are there are for niche users only and though less used, but they are serving their purpose. Also via search engine use only people are gaining more knowledge as to how to make better use of them or what other options are there. Perhaps under settings tab, a short tutorial can be added,so that people who are interested can have a direct link to learn the advacned features without searching for it. Also the advanced settings can be made simpler so that people will know what parameters will effect them in what manner, for now the language is a bit technical for non-computer science background users to understand them

Include all sources on a separate reference page in APA format. Remember to cite your source and include all references => This i believe is something that you may have to do from your side. Sources can be any friends etc. I personally asked a few friends, my wife and my nephew (tried to interview ppl from all age grp)