Exercise 2.2 - 11/1/13

We are now working on the next step of the research paper process:  finding relevant working knowledge.  We are using the book Curious Researcher by Bruce Ballenger for exercises on completing our papers.  For this exercise, we are given four different tasks on the type of research we want to look up by using general search engines, metasearch engines, or specific databases.  For this exercise, I have decided to do step #1 and find research by using general search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

The first website I looked up was on Google and it gave me a Q&A response, which I found to be very beneficial since I am very new to this topic and wanted to learn some general information about K-9 units.  I found this article to be more credible than Wikipedia, and it gave me some great background information on the types of dogs used and the kind of training the dogs go through before becoming a "police officer".  The link to this website is http://www.fallenofficersremembered.org/k-9s/k-9-facts-and-questions/

The second website I found was on Bing and this was a great website on finding specific training for K-9 dogs.  There is training for all sorts of different jobs, such as search and rescue dogs and forensic evidence dogs (there are specific jobs listed under the main categories), even for the handlers themselves.  This article is very relevant to my topic because I am still in the process of narrowing down my idea to get more specified research, and I am thinking about going on the types of job route.  The link to this website is http://www.criminaljusticeschoolinfo.com/police-k9-unit.html

The third website I found was on Yahoo and this article is more about what a police dog and its handler does on patrol.  It also talks about why law enforcement uses these dogs because of their special abilities.  It also talks about the different types of dogs used for specific kinds of jobs the dogs can possibly do.  I feel like this is the best article I found within my searches tonight because of the amount of information given and the variance in the information.  The link to this website is http://people.howstuffworks.com/police-dog2.htm

I found this exercise to be very helpful in finding some of my general information that I can use in my paper and the third website seems to be very beneficial to having general information to build off of when I find more specified research using more databases.  I am hoping to use some of this information within my paper.