Krista McCormick
SLM 521
6/05/05
If looking for information on your topic seems like your
looking for water in the desert, try these search
engines.
Google has a clear simple design and is very user
friendly. You have to the ability to search for web pages, images, news,
shopping, eGroups, and more. When
conducting a search you are quickly presented with clear, easy to read,
relevant results. I have the most
luck narrowing down a search using Google’s advanced search. If you find a
site that works for you, you have the option to find more sites similar to
it. I appreciate that the sponsored results are shown in a box off to the
side of the page. AllTheWeb also has a clear simple design and is user
friendly. You have the ability to
search for web pages, images, video, audio, and news. It has an easy to use
advanced search and quickly produces relevant results.
General Search
Google
AllTheWeb
If you are the type
that likes to get all of your shopping done in one store, this is the place
for you. This is a great compilation of search engines. It combines hits from Google, Yahoo, Ask
Jeeves, About, and several others.
It has an advanced search option that can help you narrow your
search. It searches for web pages,
images, audio, video, and news. This engine has all the wonders of MetaCrawler with an
adorable mascot, Arfie, who fetches all of your results. This is also a
very clearly built webpage that is easy to use. After starting a search, Dogpile gives you choices on how to
narrow down your search. It also lets you know on which search engine the
information was found, as does Metacrawler. A unique feature of Dogpile is
the ability to compare the results found between the different search
engines.
Meta
MetaCrawler
Dogpile
Yahooligans Yahooligans is the first place I go to find information
on the web for my classroom. You
can search using all of Yahooligans or you can choose a category from the
directory and search with in it. Each category is broken down into
subcategories to help students narrow their search further. Results are relevant and are presented
in an organized way. This would be
a fun homepage for kids as it has other features that would interest them
such as movie, music, and e-cards. Kidsclick Kidsclick is an excellent research tool for
elementary students. I find that it
is the web equivalent to going to the public library. It was developed by librarians and is organized
by the Dewey Decimal System. It is
very kid friendly and its search results are narrow. You may have 32 results compared to 150
in Yahooligans. Some searches may
find you 3 results. It has an easy to use search tutorial. The other plus
of this site is that it has no advertising.
Kid Safe
Alta Vista AltaVista was the 1st search engine to provide
image, audio, and video searches.
It has a simple design and is easy to use. Once you type in your
search topic, you can switch between all 3 media types. The searches I conducted quickly
produced many relevant hits of all 3 types of media. The beauty of AltaVista is that the
advanced search options are presented right where you type in your search
words. The family filter makes it a little less scary to use with kids, but
you still need to be careful. AllTheWeb AllTheWeb also allows you to switch between image, audio,
and video searches without you having to retype your search words. It
produced just about the same results as AltaVista but it wasn’t as user
friendly. You have to go to another
page to complete an advanced search.
Like AltaVista, you can set your preferences to filter out offensive
results and you can alter the number of results per page. This is very helpful when searching for
images.
Media
GoogleNews Google News gets its news from over 4,500 news sources. Its topics are updated every 15 minutes
and it includes news from the past 30 days. Results are compiled by a computer algorithm, so humans are
not deciding what news you will see. It is important to see how different
sources are reporting the same news. You are able to customize the page to
suit your needs. YahooNews Yahoo News Page reports news from many providers with
their main sources being Reuters, Associated Press and AFP. Its News Search
can reach over 7,000 sources in 35 different languages. The main sources continually update the
news 7 days a week. Local news is
updated daily. You can customize your page using your favorites of Yahoo’s
13 categories. Yahoo’s news page is a little easier on the eye than
Google’s.
News