To help us create our research tool, we looked at how other search engines work. Some of the sources we looked at, such as Kayak, Infomine, ISeek and Metacrawler, had features we wanted to integrate into our StreamlineResearch research tool. When reviewing Kayak’s site, we liked how the search results appeared simultaneously from different websites. Instead of searching several websites one at a time for travel information, Kayak makes it simple and faster to search on one site and obtain results from several sites. We realized this site uses meta search, which returns search results from multiple sites all at once. We then searched for more research engines and Infomine had a similar feature to Google, where a list of suggestions appeared under the search bar as a research topic is typed. We took a screenshot of the feature on this website to
Infomine.com screenshot
This is helpful in discovering more subtopics relating to your search.
ISeek has an organization option on the left side of the screen which organizes the search results. This website’s organization is a feature we want to incorporate into our research tool. We took a screenshot of the features of this site to show a general idea of what our website would include.
Iseek.com screenshot
Metacrawler is another site that has the similar features we are looking to include in our own research tool. The search bar has different tabs that allow the user to categorize their search into “web,” “images,” “video,” “news,” “yellow pages,” and “white pages.” The site also shows the databases from which they retrieve the search results. This allows the user to search multiple databases at the same time.
Based on the article “Web Research Guide,” “Meta-search engines can save time, but it’s best not to rely on them exclusively. Since search engines interpret search terms differently, one or more of them might misunderstand your keyword(s).” A possible solution to this issue would be to include a homonym detector option in our search tool. If a search happens to provide search results for two different topics, you can highlight the misunderstood keyword and click on the homonym button. Then a few definitions will appear under the button and the correct definition referring to the search topic can be selected to provide a new set of search results with the intended topic.
Since different search engines use different databases, our Streamline Research research tool will use participating school library databases as well as the general online web databases to generate searches. Also, when search results appear, it will be organized in categories: journals, articles, ebooks, videos, topics, authors, places, organizations, date, abbreviations, and web source. We thought about adding a short summary of the search results, once the cursor is hovered on top of a search result, will help you quickly decide if that source will aid you with your search; if not you can simply hover on to the next search result. Based on our research experience, our project will have a citation option which allows you to cite the source without the need of another source tool. Sites that offer automatic citation reduces the stress of having to figure out how to correctly cite the source and eliminates the process of using a separate site, like Purdue Owl, to help you cite.
A last feature our research tool will incorporate is a plagiarism detector. Once you finish writing a research paper which includes the sources gathered from our research tool, we decided accidental plagiarism could happen. We would like to incorporate this feature to help avoid this mishap and our research tool would truly be a one stop research tool for writing your research paper.
We now have created an ideal research tool where you can search multiple sources all at the same time without having to leave this research site, categorize them in media categories of video, newspaper, magazine, ejournals, etc. and instantly cite the sources you’ll be using. Finally you will be able to check for plagiarism when your reseach paper has been completed and ready to hand in. All the frustration of having to research search engines that will provide you with the necessary sources will no longer exist when using this research tool.
