To: Jason Buchanan
From: Group 3
RE: “Housing Market” Search
Date: February 14, 2008

First step in searching for the housing market, we went to www.lib.purdue.edu and entered the “Articles and Database” section. We then received 403 databases to search our topic. From there, we selected the Lexis/Nexis academic site. We then performed an easy search. There were three separate steps within the easy search. First, we had to type in the keywords for our search (the housing market). Then we were able to select what exactly we wanted to search within. We chose the following: Major U.S. and World Publications, News Wire Services, Legal, SEC Filings, Company, and Web Publications. Finally, we selected the specific time period we wanted to search within and we selected the past two years.
After receiving 988 hits on the housing market with our specific search, we realized we need to be more specific to narrow our results. We narrowed our search down to 547 hits by searching the Indiana housing market and limit our time period to the week before. We figured that after narrowing it down this much we had sufficient amount of information in order to do research on the topic.
Looking back at the PowerPoint that we read before performing this search, it was helpful in the way that it made us more aware of the reputable search engines that are out there. However, once we were actually at the site, we really did not need to look back at the PowerPoint for help. The search engine that we used was very basic and self explanatory. It really did not need to be explained using the PowerPoint because of how it pretty much explained itself on the site. Therefore, we decided that the PowerPoint was helpful but only as a guide to lead us to better search engines.