Search Engines

When you get an assignment, it’s easy just to go home, open the Internet and use whatever search engine you see to start looking. However, by doing this you may only be getting a small portion of the information that is available. Recent studies show that over 80% of the pages brought up on a search engine may only be available on that search engine (Sterling 2007). Here are five categories of search engines that may help you in your research: best general search engines, best image search engines, best shopping search engines, best travel search engines, and the best medical search engines.

General Search Engines

Google: This search engine is fast and returns good results. Google ranks pages using page-ranking technology. The sites are ranked on over one hundred different criteria including appearance of search phrase and popularity. This helps to ensure that the more relevant sites appear first in your results. It also has tabs so you can change between different aspects of what you may be looking for and a spell check to offer suggestions of refining your search. www.google.com

Yahoo!: This search engine returns good results. It offers many opportunities to personalize you home page so that links to frequently viewed sites will be easily available. Another nice feature is that it offers similar phrases to those you searched for to help focus your search and find what you are looking for. Lastly, they have a lot of other helpful pages, directly from their home page including job pages and news pages. http://www.yahoo.com/

Image Search Engines

Google Images: As with Google, this search engine returns fast results and lots of them. By clicking on the picture, you can go to the original website. Unfortunately, you then have to click at the top of the page to enlarge the image. It is very easy to go from searching the internet for information to searching for images of the same subject because there are tabs at the top of the page that allow you to go back and forth. http://images.google.com/

Imagery: This site returns a lot of results but is meant to be used for images only. The results are good quality and in full color. You can organize your search by image type, size, and color. By rolling over an image you can choose to open it larger in another window or view it in its original context. This is especially good for art searches because it allows you to view it up close and returns a variety of works from that artist. The down side is that it only returns images and can be difficult to get information on the image, such as the name of an artwork or when it was created. http://elzr.com/imagery

News Search Engines

Google News: This site ranks stories by which one are the most popular or most news worthy of the day. You can narrow the news by category such as international or business. News is gathered from a variety of sources around the globe. You can also personalize Google News to you interest so only those stories appear. http://news.google.com/

Bing News: This site organizes its home page into categories to help you find what you are looking for. For example, there is an international heading with two or three top stories from that section of news. Search results are fast and recent. The main problem seems to be that some of the sources are not as well known as other sites. http://www.bing.com/news

Travel Search Engines

Bing Travel: Bing travel is available directly from their home page. By simply putting in your travel information (where your leaving from, where your going, when your going ect) you can comparison shop between many travel sites. You can then narrow your search and can also search for hotels and car rentals. Best of all they have Farecast technology, which indicates if prices are rising so you know when the best time to buy is so you get the best price. http://www.bing.com/travel/

AOL Pinpoint Travel: Similar to Bing, you can search multiple travel sites and compare prices. Also, the site has a calendar available on the home page that lists flight price by day so, if you can, you can change the date to get the cheapest flight. You can search hotel and car rental agencies also. The main problem is that if you choose to comparison shop the site opens up a different window for each site, which can be annoying and cluttering. http://www.pinpointtravel.com/

Medical Search Engines

Web MD: This site is fast and returns a lot of answers. They include a news section, and links to common questions such as drugs and supplements and pregnancy. The site also includes a symptom checker where you can click on a part of the body, describe the symptom and then receive possible conditions and advice. http://www.webmd.com/

Health Line: This site returns articles from journals and online forums as results. Many of them are from online sources. You can search by treatment or symptom. They also have tabs to help you find medicine or a doctor. While the results were helpful, they were not as comprehensive as other sites and sometimes seemed to be more focused on news result then answering medical questions. http://www.healthline.com/