This weeks exercise took me back to those days when I used to teach the following course at my previous job "How to search the Internet effectively" - much of the course revolved around comparing subject directories, search engines, meta search engines and more....
What surprised me was that I found that searching in del.icio.us gave me the most relevant search, not what I was expecting. I didn't spend lots of time refining search strategies - it was a very "lazy" search - but maybe this reflects how lots of our users search anyway?
It didn't find lots of search results but the ones it found were good sites - and I assume this is what you would expect - if someone has taken the time to tag it - then they also think its a good site.
With the search engines and meta search engines I wasn't really finding anything much else new except a couple on Zuula, though probably CiteULike and Connotea were a little too academic for my search - but could be useful in a research context. The search engines and meta searches did the usual of bringing back a lot of "noise" - so you definitely got more results, but had to wade through much more info to find what you needed.
The subject searching on the catalogue in my opinion is for Librarians who know how to structure these searches!
I didn't find so much on Kartoo - but did like the way it provided the inter-relationships between terms and the ability to refine your searches using these links. And its always nice to see something visually!
Scritty
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