Week 2: Research Log Entry

1.My question was "What was Frederick Douglass' childhood like?"
2. I began with the terms "Frederick Douglass" "childhood" and "slavery"
3. I used the search engines: ask.com, google, and yahoo.
4a.I used Frederick Douglass, Childhood, and slavery. I varied the results by omitting slavery on certain searches.
4b. I tried using quotation marks to narrow down the searches and to keep important terms together. I also tried the nesting technique to get more hits that would be more relevant to my question.
5a. I first looked at the website's URL and short text under each hit. By looking at the URL, i can usually determine what kind of site it is and whether or not it would be relevant to my topic. I also paid attention to the link's title.
5b. All the search engines got hits about my topic, however, they all did not get the same exact hits. It was helpful that all the search engines i used had some sort of suggestion. This proved essential as it would check my spelling and show similar useful topics. It seemed that Yahoo has the highest hits while Google and ask.com trailed it in respective order.
5c. I think the search engine did its search on the basis of who their target age group was. Yahoo normally caters to young adults and teens as they have games and fun things on their normal website. I recall seeing quite a lot of Sparknotes.com hits on the yahoo search engine which would be a result of catering to young adults who usually rely on summary sites. With this in mind, naturally assumed that ask.com and google were targeting an older age group.
6. One question i had was if there were more boolean operators than the basic quotes, and not, and etc.