Top Search Engines
And the winners are…?
Meta Search engines are search engines which search multiple search engines at once. Using this method a person can search a word or subject on the internet and get many hits from multiple sites. This way is convenient but often times the better search engines are left out. The two I favored for the category were Dogpile and Metacrawler. Both had similar results, if not identical, however they were easier to use and follow than others.
General Search Engines:
Of all the general search engines I used, I found Google and Altavista the best. These two engines provide the most hits with the most usable information. These sites were the most user friendly and offered varying information on the subjects searched.
Subject Search Engines:
Many people believe that subject search engines are the best search engines to use. This is because these sites are built and evaluated by humans. For the subject search I chose to search five items on the following search engines: Librarian’s Index, Infomine, Yahoo, About.com, and AcademicInfo. I found About.com and Yahoo as the best. The most was information provided for the search on these search engines and the information was usable and easy to follow.
Shopping Search Engines:
Many people use the internet for shopping and want quick and easy results. I searched for five items, stability ball, medical tape, water coolers, free weights, and treadmill, on four search engines, Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, and Lycos. Of these four search engines, I found Yahoo and Lycos to be most useful. This is because both had sections specifically for shopping. Yahoo even allowed you to become a user for repeat customers. Both showed sites where a person could purchase items and in the list of results, pictures were even shown of what the item was.
Image Search Engines:
Google and Altavista were the two search engines that I easily found images on. Both search engines contained sections for locating images only. These sites were user friendly and provided a great number of hits.
