Aimee Kelly

SLM 521

Spring 2004

My Top Search Engines

Kids Search Engines

First Place – I chose Yahooligans as the best search engine for kids because it gave me the highest quantity of quality results for my simple search requests. For one search, several of the other popular kid’s search engines gave me no results and this side reported five quality sites.

http://yahooligans.yahoo.com/

Second Place – I chose AJKids as second place because, though it does not meet every need, it is unique and fills a specific role. This site reports a limited number of sites to answer an actual question that a child types in the search box. Very specific, kid-friendly answers are the result.

http://www.ajkids.com/

News Search Engines

First Place – Google News gave me an organized homepage with up-to-date headlines, some within the last five minutes. When a search was completed, top stories about the subject from top news authorities such as BBCNews and Reuters were posted first. One recent event in the world brought forth well over one thousand results. http://news.google.com/

Second Place – Yahoo News gave me an organized homepage as well. It also contained up-to-date headlines. There were many quality search results for each query. What I like less about this engine was its lack of reputable sources highlighted at the beginning of the search results.

http://news.yahoo.com/

Teacher Search Engines

First Place – This site gave me results through educational websites from Google. There were an amazing amount of results, almost too many to sort through. However, the results are sorted in a way that you would most likely find the information you need at the beginning of the list of results rather than at the end.

http://www.searchedu.com/

Second Place – I chose Education World as my second place teacher search engine because, though it gives significantly less results than SearchEdu.com, it did give me a fair number of quality results for each query. I even received seven results for onomatopoeia. http://www.education-world.com/

Government Search Engines

First Place – The FirstGov site is a gem because it is the official web portal of the U.S. government. For this reason, it is fairly safe to assume that any information you receive about the national government from this site will be accurate.

http://www.firstgov.gov/

Second Place – The Google – Uncle Sam search is an excellent option for quantity. You will not just get the government’s official stance on issues, but also the views of others. The sheer volume of results is staggering. I received 630,000 results for a search on “medical marijuana”.

http://www.google.com/unclesam

Media Search Engines

First Place – Lycos Pictures and Sounds lets you search for audio, video, MP3, and images. It would take a while to sift through all your results, there are so many! The options are worth it.

http://multimedia.lycos.com/

Second Place – AltaVista comes in a close second for media searches. It too allows you to search audio, video, MP3, and images. The number of results comes in a close second to Lycos, allowing a large range of choices for your creative projects.

http://www.altavista.com/