Comparing Google and Google Scholar search results for customer relationship management

Email, And Ethics

Search Engine Comparison

Choose a topic related to your major and conduct a short research exercise. First use Google to search for information on your topic. Once you've done that, use Google Scholar to find information on the same topic. Then, in a coherent paragraph or two, compare the results that each search engine yielded. Be sure to indicate what topic you researched and be specific about how the results varied, considering things like audience (who would make use of each set of results?), purpose (why might a person conduct the search in the first place, and would the purpose of the search determine which search engine one might use?), and reliability (can you count on the information the search yielded being truthful and accurate?).

The term searched on was "customer relationship management" (CRM) using Google search followed by Google Scholar search. The Google search generated 58.8 million results and Google Scholar, 1.85 million results. Both search results provided immediate clarification of the concept and mentioned, within the first five results, the core concept of CRM as delivering a 360-degree view of the customer (Wang, Feng, 2012). Both also provided a broad selection of links, many of which had PDFs and images associated with them on both search engines.

Where the two search engines differed however was in the area of topical value. Context, content and topicality of the data presented showed significantly different results. The organic Google search engine showed how capricious and easily modified search results are, with the dubious source, Wikipedia, being one of the top entries. There were also a series of entries for CRM software vendors who had clearly oriented their entire content strategy to the goal of dominating organic Google search results. Now that Google organic search includes a summary of images in textual or link-based results, there is an abundance of vendor-generated content in this area as well. The audience for all the organic Google search results is the enterprise software buyer of CRM systems. Conversely, the results from Google Scholar show a significantly different series of results. These include a series of scholarly papers on the nature of CRM's evolution from a policy and strategic-based approach. The series of entries in the Google Scholar search of customer relationship management also show that academicians are more concerned about the conceptual frameworks that these software applications propel and make possible. Further, Google Scholar search shows that academicians are more concerned with the social and political ramifications of CRM than the vendors are. This is the single most differentiating aspect of the findings, as academicians lean towards public policy and vendors promote their applications'; unique features and functions.

Part 3: Plagiarism and the Internet

In this week's reading you learned how to recognize and avoid ethical abuses in the workplace. But ethical abuses can happen and do happen in academic settings as well. With so much information readily available on the Internet, and with the ease of copying and pasting text from one document into