Databases and Search Engines

Who knew so much goes into just searching a simple topic? I sure didn’t and it may be the reason why most of the time I end up with a ton of information and not quite sure how to decipher it all. Just recently I had to write a paper about symbolism and character development on a story for my literature class. The professor wanted use a database to find sources that backed up our ideas. If I had read Badke’s chapter on databases I could have saved a lot of time not having to sift through a lot of useless information. Badke has a way of putting things into simple context that anyone can understand. Since we usually search with keywords we get a lot of broad information and not quite the exact information we may be looking for because that keyword can come up in many sources that are irrelevant to what you’re looking for. That’s why we need to add commands like OR, AND, and NOT to narrow our results and get exactly what we’re searching for, which I did not know about. We could also use many keywords that need to be included in the search to narrow the number of results and get more relevant information. While search engines and databases are great tools to use we need to be specific in our keywords so we don’t spend hours going through results that are of no value.