A4.5 Girondo Search

The exercise on researching my last name provided me with great insight on the vast amounts of information that is available on the web. Before I actually began researching my last name I had this preconceived idea that I would not receive many hits about my name. I felt that I had a very uncommon last name which would limit the amount of hits returned. After completing the research on my last name I realized that my last name is not as uncommon as I thought. To complete the research on my last name I used four search engines. These included Google, Yahoo Search, Ask.com, and Itools. Each of these search engines returned thousands of hits about my last name. One observation I made when  using these search engines was that the number of hits that were returned directly correlated to the popularity of the search engine. When researching my last name on Google I received more hits than other search engine. The less popular the site was the less hits I received. I feel that this has to do with the number of databases of web pages each site has. I also noticed that the number of hits returned did not change if I capitalized the first letter of my last name or if I put quotations around my name. Another thing I noticed is that a lot of the hits returned to me were the same in each search engine. When researching my last name I returned a lot of hits from each search engine on Oliverio Girondo and many of those hits were in Spanish. This surprised me because I have always concidered my last name as being Italian. After completing this exercise I learned that it is important for people conducting research to make sure that the search engine they are using is a reliable search engine. It is better to conduct research from a search engine that has a large database of web documents rather than a small one. Using a search engine with a small database of web documents only limits the number of hits that will be returned to the person conducting the research. I also learned that there really is not limit to the amount of information that can be found on the web. Even if you think there is no information on the web about a topic you’re researching you will probably be able to find something. The key is to make sure that the information or hits you recieve are accurate and reliable.