Lab+10+-+Discussion+on+Reflection+of+Functionality+and+Transparency

The two major online information sources I used for my media analysis of Nicki Minaj are Google News and Wikipedia. Nicki Minaj is an upcoming rap artist that has worked with many other talents such as Lil’Wayne and Toronto’s own, Drake. She has become a very popular female rap artist that has created a lot of buzz in the media recently, which is why I chose to use her for my media analysis based on transparency and functionality on **Google News** and **Wikipedia**.

**Google News** presented a lot of articles regarding Nicki Minaj. I found the information very organized with many subheadings to chose from in order to view the most up to date articles written about Nicki Minaj. You can find articles written within the hour about Nicki Minaj. I found that very interesting as well as the variety of pictures to chose from and look at. This on its own presents functionality. This is through categorizing articles by time, from the most recent to articles posted about her from ‘1999-2001’ and you can even look further back in the ‘Archives’ section. Not only does the does Google News pulls up articles concerning Nicki Minaj, it also pulls up blogs about her. I believe that if you are trying to find out what is new about Nicki Minaj a blog may be the best way to find it out because she has a lot of fans out there that keep up to date with her life, through the blogs you may be able to find more information, maybe even personal information concerning her rather then through news articles. When going through the search hits, I found maybe after the 30th page did the information get irrelevant and the search engine was only pulling up articles where Nicki Minaj was only mentioned in and not actually based on her. This shows that the quality of the Google News search is effective in pulling up all relevant articles concerning Nicki Minaj. Other ways in which I found Google News functional when searching Nicki Minaj, is there were no broken links or annoying pop ads or just ads on the search page.

As for transparency, several of the articles that were the first hits on the search were from credible websites such as MTV.com. This shows that Google News pulls the most credible information first. I found that a lot of the blogs were not credible, which is a bit obvious because anyone can make a blog and write information about anyone.

I have to admit when searching Nicki Minaj on **Wikipedia** I was a bit annoyed with seeing a big advertisement at the top of the page that takes up a lot of space. In terms of information in relation to functionality, the information was legible and easy to read because it was organized into headings. It looked more like a brief autobiography concerning Nicki Minaj, it didn’t have any recent information like Google News did. I did like that it had links to her official website, Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. It also had related links that readers may be interested in reading concerning other artists that Nicki Minaj has worked with.

In terms of transparency, there is a long list of references towards the bottom of the page, showing where individuals got the information they put on the page. The only thing is that absolutely anyone that has a Wikipedia account can change information on the page. Therefore, not making it a reliable source to gather information about anything or anyone or in this case about Nicki Minaj.

When comparing the two sites, I have come to the conclusion that Google News is a better site to gather and browse through information, this was proven through the analysis of functionality and transparency on both Google News and Wikipedia when finding information about Nicki Minaj.