Assessment #2
For my second assessment I decided to search for information on the topic of birthday party games for children. I put in the URL http://www.webtaxi.com. From there I chose my first search engine to be Excite. I put in the key words kids+birthday+party+games. The excite search found 2,290,494 different sites using those key words. I went through about 60 different sites to find 3 really good sites that I thought might help me find some games for kids when planning my next children’s party. I also found many sites that were not very helpful at all. A lot of sites were trying to sell you a party kit to make a party fun instead of telling you some ideas on what to do. Other sites that weren’t helpful were sites that were selling their services. There were many sites that would rent out there place of business for you to have your party there. Three sites that I went to that weren’t very helpful for my needs were:

1) http://downtown.web.aol.com/ads/s/SimpliFun/ad354/page_1.html

2) http://server1.service.com/Gymboree/home.html

3) http://www.purplenet.net/~slt/birth.html

These three sites focused on selling something to have at your party or selling a service. They didn’t provide any fun activities to have at your party, which is what I was looking for. I did find three sites that I did get some good ideas from for a children’s birthday party. I found a great site that allowed people to write in and ask questions about different ideas for parties. You could search by using keywords in this site to find questions and answers directly relating to your needs. The following are three sites that I thought would be helpful to me.

1)http://www.parentsoup.com/library/docs/bergstrom/Eoct10.html

2)http://www.wwvisions.com/craftbb/kids/339.html

3)http://www.wwvisions.com/craftbb/kids/950.html

In these three sites I found ideas that would help me when planning a children’s party. They also had links to other places that I could search to find other ideas.

The second time I searched this topic I used the search engine AltaVista and came up with 300,000 different sites. I went through the first 100 and most of them were not what I needed. With this search engine I really had to search through all the hits it made to get three that I thought might be of some help to me. Three that I found that wouldn’t help me in my search for fun party games were:

1)http://www.qtm.net/ckm/birthdayparties.html

2)http://kidsparties.com/listing.htm

3)http://www.dfwbiz.com/betsy.htm

These three simply either sold a good or service for a children’s party. They didn’t help with any fun game ideas. Through searching I found three that would give me a little help. The first one was a really good site for my what I needed to find out. The other two were not as good but they might be able to help a little bit. The sites that I would use to help me get information on my topic are:

1)http://www.baskinrobbins.com/party.html

2)http://www.frugalfun.com/kidsart.html

3)http://www.stretcher.com/stories/960520c.htm

Overall I found that I liked the Excite search much better than the search I performed with AltaVista. I found with Excite there were many sites to choose from as compared to AltaVista where I really had to search to find only three good sites.