Database or Search engine?

During this blog post, I will be talking about data bases and search engines. But, what is a database and how is it different from a search engine? You will know soon enough. First and foremost, when is it appropriate to use Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a web search engine that can be edited by anyone. If you're writing a report on key figures in the American Revolution, Wikipedia is not the place to find your evidence. Although, you can use Wikipedia to find a keywords like John Adams or Benjamin Franklin. Once you have a key word like this, you can search it in a database to find some useful and accurate information.

Now I'm going to being talking about the key differences between search engines and databases. A database is source of vetted and accurate information. If you don't know what vetted means, it means that it has been examined very carefully. Also, search engines will give you too much information that you won't have enough time to search through. For example, I am doing a report on cars and I need some information. I search cars into google and get 2,110,000,000 results. 2,110,000,000! That is way to many results to search through for a report. Now, if i search cars into a search engine, I'll get about 25,000 results. That is still a lot of results but much less than google. Looking at these stats, you can probably tell that databases have narrowed down the information. The databases haven't gotten rid of good information, but they have eliminated the bad information. All in all, databases give you accurate information that comes from a trustworthy source.

For my courage project, I have chosen three databases use for my research. I'm not quite sure what I will be researching, but I will be using Access Video, Gale Group, and ProQuest. Looking forward to the next blog post!