Jennifer Sterling
September 5, 2009
SLM 521
Search Engines
The internet is limitless in the
information that we can find, whether it be on Obama’s
last speech, dog agility, the latest recipes or the sprained ankle that you
recently received. Being able to find
reliable information is very important no matter what we are searching
for. Below I have included the search
engines which I feel did the best for the job at hand.
General Search Engines
Google - www.google.com
Google seemed to be the easiest to use,
along with given the best results. I
noticed, when using some other search engines, you would end up with a lot of
personal pages or retail sites on that specific topic. Google seemed to develop a list of sites geared
more towards organizations and information from more reliable sources. They also give you the ability to easily just
search for images, videos, news, etc.
Ask - www.ask.com
Ask.com also was very easy to use and
allowed you to search for specific categories of what you may be looking for in
terms of images, news, videos, etc. The
results for various searches were generally reliable sites but did include more
retail sites related to the search topic.
Kid Safe Search Engines
www.squirrelnet.com/search/Google_SafeSearch.asp
This search engine is brought to us by Google
and provides the same quality of search results. Although some kid safe search engines are
flashier to provide more visual excitement, squirrel net allows kids to
misspell words. Unlike some other search
engines a child can misspell what they are searching for and the correct option
for that word can be chosen. I think
that this is very important because it could be frustrating for a child to use
the internet if they are a bad speller.
Yahoo Kids - www.kids.yahoo.com
This search engine had all the bells and
whistles on its main page. Kids can find
the newest games, read about various cartoons they are interested and even ask
Earl questions.
The opening page is very busy which may make it hard for first time
users to find where they are suppose to enter what they are searching for. The search results provide wonderful options
but the site does have a downfall, if the words that are being searched for are
spelled incorrectly the site does not pick up on what they may be looking
for.
Image Search
Google - www.images.google.com
Google once again tope them all by
providing a multitude of images. When
searching under the image tab pictures of all kinds will be found including
photos, drawling, cartoons, etc.
Yahoo - www.yahoo.com
Yahoo also allows the searcher to find
various types of images. I would still
put this search engine in second place for images because not as many images
are displayed on one page, requiring the viewer to continue through the pages
to find what they may be looking for.
Medical Search Engines
WebMd - www.webmd.com
This site can answer any medical questions
you may have, which is a little frightening in my opinion. On the other hand we can better take care of
ourselves the more we know. WebMD has a
wonderful home page full of articles but one of the bonuses of this site is
that it lists the most common health conditions right on the front page. It is good places for anyone to start when
finding out more about a specific health issue.
When doing a general search the website comes up with many articles but
before the articles are listed the site provides a “table of contents” per say
which allows you to narrow your search down quickly.
Medicine Net - www.medicinenet.com
This web sites home page is full of
interesting health information that you can find yourself getting lost in. Not only does the site have various
categories you can search into, such as symptoms, medications, and picture
slideshows, you can also do a broad search.
I really like how the site categorizes the various articles that it
finds on the desired subject.
News Search Engines
Google News - www.news.google.com
Google news seems to be a wonderful site to
look up anything that is news related.
If searching for a specific topic it tends to bring up the more
predominate news sites first for the related article but as you go through, the
site lists less popular newspaper articles.
The site also lists the top headlines of the day on its opening page.
Yahoo News - www.news.yahoo.com
Yahoo news is very similar to Google
news. The opening page is full of the day’s
top headlines. When searching for a
specific topic it lists the articles a little differently. Yahoo news seems to more randomly select the
articles on the topic that you are searching, instead of bring up the top
newspapers articles first. All the
articles are still coming form reliable sources.