SLM 521
June 9, 2003
This type of
search engine compiles information from other search engines – similar to your
own personal shopper! It searches
quickly, but not necessarily thoroughly; according to an article written by UC
Berkeley Library, meta-search engines only “catch” about 10% of the search
results in any of the search engines they visit.
This site allows
the user to search the web for text, images or multimedia “hits.” It is fairly simple to use, but can be a bit
more confusing than some of the general search engines. The top five links it found through Google
did match the top five links that I found by searching directly on Google for
the same key term. It also offered links
to several other search engine results.
http://www.dogpile.com/index.gsp
This meta-search
engine allows the user to search the Web, MP3 files, news or pictures. It claims to be the fastest growing
meta-search engine since 1999. The user
can specify certain search engines for IxQuick to search. The sites that are listed on several search
engines are starred and highlighted with a red “tip.”
Image Search Sites (Clipart)
This type of
search engine targets images – such as clipart, photographs or drawings – only.
A staggering
selection of clipart, photographs, paintings and drawings! This site is a great resource for finding
just the right image to insert into a paper or a web site.
Another huge
selection of photographs and clipart.
Altavista Image search offers information about the images such as their
size as well as a link to the site where the search engine originally
discovered the images.
http://www.altavista.com/image
This type of
search engine focuses on newspapers and magazines to locate newsworthy
events.
This site searches
35,000 news sites, weblogs and RSS feeds for current events and breaking
news. The user can also connect to top
news events by clicking on the tool bar on the top of the home page.
This site searches
for news events, and can be time-limited.
The user can also limit news coverage to specific topics such as
business, press releases, sports or politics.
There is a “search news archives” feature that allows a search of news
stories that are more than two weeks old.
http://www.northernlight.com/news.html
These sites are
more “kid-friendly” than the general search sites.
This site is
geared specifically toward children, although many of the links led to articles
that were rather difficult to read. The
home page is kid-friendly, and has links to games, music, E-cards, jokes and
sports as well as other topics.
This site asks
children to type in a question to “ask” Jeeves. Jeeves then come up with responses for the child to choose
from. For example, I typed the
question, “What is the largest Hawaiian island?” and Jeeves offered me the
choice of five questions, such as “Where can I learn about or see the world’s
largest islands?” and “Where can I find resources to practice, study, or help
with Hawaiian?” This site also links
users to other search engines such as Yahooligans! and Federal Education
Resources. It is set up in an
interesting format, but may be confusing to younger children who may just type
in a word or two.
http://www.ajkids.com/index.asp
These search
engines are not as specific as some of the more specialized ones, and are
certainly more familiar to most people.
General search engines allow the user to type in phrases or keywords to
gain access to full-text documents.
This is one of the
most well-known search engines, and my personal favorite. It searches through more than three billion
web pages to find your keyword or phrase.
The tabs are divided into “web,” which is a web search as described
above, ”images,” which allows the user to search images to find photographs and
clipart, and “directory,” where the “web is organized by topic into
categories.”
AllTheWeb
This site searches
through more than two billion web pages.
The user can conduct an advanced search by choosing a language
preference, creating a Boolean query, specifying a media type (images, audio,
video, etc.,), and size of document.
Additionally, this site allows the user to customize searches. Among other options, this feature has an
“offensive content filter,” an option to control the number of results
displayed per page and a text size.