Thing 12. Other Search Engines

Google may be first choice for searching for many of us, but there are other search engines that you and your students may be using. How each search engine finds its results is a big secret, but you can look at the results returned to determine which is most useful for your purpose. Your searching will be more efficient and return more results if you take a few minutes to compare the search results from various search engines (Google, Ask, Yahoo, MSN) and metasearch engines (Clusty, Dogpile). Different search engines may be better for certain types of searches.

Core
1. Run the same searches in more than one search engine and compare the results. Try Ask.com, Yahoo!, MSN, or another one you know and use. Use both broad terms (eg cardinal and narrower terms--cardinal baseball). How did the results compare?
2. These tools can make the comparison easier:
This tool shows results from LiveSearch, Google, and Yahoo. It gives Best Results, but also shows unique hits from each search engine.
This guy has a way to show Google and Yahoo results side-by-side.
This tool gives an interesting visualization of Google (top) and Yahoo (bottom) results.
3. Meta search engines they make it easy to send a query to several search engines at once. DogPile and Clusty are two to try.
4. Visual search engines display results in a more graphical format. Try your search in these search engines: Kartoo displays a visual map of results. Qunitura gives both a graphical result and a list 5. This is a different approach to visual display of information. Just for fun, try MusicPlasma.

Resources

• SearchEngineShowdown will help you keep-up-to-date on the news of search engines.
• SearchEngineLand watches the big three: Google, Yahoo!, and LiveSearch. Each has its own “land” for info, as well as a Web news on the home page. This has a marketing bent, but also notes other info on the various engines.
• This article gives an update on changes in Yahoo! And LiveSearch.
• Handy Chart of Search Engine Features with links to full review of each search engine.
• Same info in a different format.
  

Make the Connection

Students—and teachers and LMS and parents and basically all of us—will continue to use the search engines as a main source of our research. Understanding that different search engines retrieve different results can help students improve their search results. And, of course, that goes hand-in-hand with teaching how to evaluate the information on the sites in the results list.

Blog Prompts

• How do the search engine results compare to the database results?
• Did you get similar or different results from different search engines? Meta-search engines?
• Are there different features offered by various engines which you like or dislike?
• Did this exercise impact your opinion about any of the engines you tried?
• Did you try MusicPlasma? What did you think?