Internet Addiction Disorder

An Online Search Report

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The topic I have chosen for this assignment is “Internet Addiction Disorder”. The reason for this is that this is a relatively new finding and thus would have limited published literature on it. Also studies done on it would have a good effect on online marketing and e-commerce is general.

Google

I started off my search with Google (www.google.com), one of the most popular search engines around. I started my search with just typing in Internet Addiction Disorder in the search box. It came up with 718,000 results as seen below. The results, though seemingly relevant, could be customized further.

 I then typed in “Internet Addiction Disorder” (within quotes) so that it would search only for that particular phrase. It then came up with only 10,400 results. An improvement over that previous 718,000! The results are displayed below. Note that in both, the first page of results are almost identical here.

 I the went a step further to narrow down results and searched for documents with Internet Addiction Disorder only in the title of the page. This I did by typing allintitle:  "internet addiction disorder" in the search box. It came up with only 186 results, all of which are highly relevant to this search. Results displayed below.

Google Scholar

Next I tried a search engine that is powered by Google but searches only “scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research”. It is called Google Scholar and it is still in its beta version. (http://scholar.google.com). When I put in Internet addiction disorder as the search term there, I got 2,680 results, as below.

Next I put the search term within quotes again, the search term was “internet addiction disorder”. This came up with only 89 results. As displayed below. It should be mentioned that some o the results are only citations and are thus not relevant.

Lastly in Google scholar I searched for the term only within the title. The search term was typing allintitle:  "internet addiction disorder. This came up with only 15 results but 10 of them were only citations so we have only 5 usable results. Results are below.

Metacrawler

The search engine I tried next was Metacrawler (www.metacrawler.com).  First I put in the search term Internet Addiction disorder and I got only 78 results as displayed below.

When I searched for the term “Internet addiction disorder” on Metacrawler, I got 57 results, weeding out the ones which were not relevant at all. Results are below.  

Altavista

The next search engine was Altavista (www.altavista.com). When I put in the term Internet addiction disorder I got many results (1,080,000) but the first few were sponsored sites and not relevant at all.

Next I tried to narrow the search down by using quotes. The search term was “internet addiction disorder”. The results obtained were 19,000 which was less that the earlier result much still to large a number to be all quality links. Results are below.

Next I tried to narrow down the date of the results. Since the disorder was not discovered before 1997, any results from before that are irrelevant. So I restricted the search to articles from 1997 onwards and with the exact phrase “internet addiction disorder” as below. It found 18,800 results, slightly lower than before.

Results below 

Lycos

The next search engine I tried was Lycos (www.lycos.com). Lycos uses the Ask Jeeves search technology. I put in Internet addiction disorder as a search term and got back 196 results, all of which looked quite relevant. As displayed below.

Then as I tried to narrow the search results, I put the term within quotes – “internet addiction disorder” and then I got 193 results; just slightly lesser than the previous search.

Proquest

The next search engine was Proquest. It was accessed from within the CSU library and it generally returns more scholarly results like peer to peer reviewed papers etc. I first tried a search with the term internet addiction disorder and with limiting my results to full text articles only and also to include scholarly journals. The results were 12 documents as displayed below.

Next I dropped the word disorder from the search term to expand the search as the first one only produced 12 results. I searched only for internet addiction and I got only 10 results. They are displayed below. It should be noted that although the results obtained by Proquest are less in quantity, they are of the highest quality.

OVID

The next search engine I used was OVID also acceded from the CSU library. I put the term internet addiction disorder and got only 6 results as displayed below.

Science Direct

The final search engine I used was Science Direct also from within the CSU library. Here I put the search term internet addiction disorder and I got back 8 results. Although there were so limited results, they were highly relevant.