Cynthia Vaskis
SLM521 Spring
2004
Search Engine Assignment
4/18/04
File: srengine.htm
Summary results from Search Engines Assignment
The purpose of this lesson
is to evaluate different types of search engines and to pick the best and worst
in each category. I selected the types
of search engines to be the General search engines, the Meta-Search engine, the
News search engines, the Education search engines and the Medical search
engines. For the following General,
Meta-Search and News engines I used queries from different topical areas. They are listed below with those topics
mentioned in parentheses.
1. Mars rover design specifications Spirit
(current news, science, technology)
2.
3. Bush moon habitat robots future 2005
(government, science, current news, politics)
4. American Idol TV show George Huff (popular
culture,
5. Small pox terrorists United States Maryland
(medical, government defense, current events, geography)
6.
The News search engines
sometimes require you to enter a specific newspaper, magazine, radio or TV station to use as a source for the search. They needed specific time frames to search
and locations around the world and in what languages you wanted to use. This was too complicated for me but if I was
a reporter and knew about a specific story I wanted to read about, this would
probably be very useful. These do not do
well in general topic searches because you have to specify where you want to
search and this limits your overall coverage area from which to draw the
results.
The Education search engines
came in two different flavors or structures.
Some were completely organized lists of topics that you had to choose
from and there was no way to enter a query.
Others allowed you to enter a query or search request and it would tell
you anything it had that matched it or where you could go to look for it. These proved to be more useful to me.
The Medical search engines
are listed last and were very complicated to use. You almost needed to know what category the
information was in before you started looking.
The ones that had a query or search request entry window were the most
useful to me but still did not return exact matches. They made it difficult to combine words into
one search phrase such as “mad cow disease” and it would instead look for one
word instead of all of them together.
Where I Found the Search Engines to Review
To find the directories in
the General Search Engines and Meta-Search Engines I used those mentioned in
the pages of linked material to the assignment Search Engines. To find the directories used in the categories
News, Education, and Medical categories below I looked at this URL
(http://search.yahoo.com/search/dir?p=web%2Bdirectories&h=C) where the
different topic directories listed the most popular search engines.
General Search Engines Review
The best two general search engines were www.AltaVista.com and
www.Google.com. They both returned a
lot of results but AltaVista had pictures associated with the requested topic
which were fantastic. It also had linked
to any videos with text pages associated with the query which was really
helpful in the Web Quest assignment. Google Advanced Search has the option to pick a time frame
to search within and where the search should happen within the text (in the
title, the URL, the main body or the text, etc.) It also lets you pick a language and SafeSearch (filtering) if you want it. You can do complicated queries easily there
with the options such as “all” the words which means use AND between each word,
with the exact phrase (as if it was in quotes), with at least one (OR between
every word), and without the words (NOT AND).
I like the way Google lists the results with
the date of the entry (when it was posted to the web). It also has extras on the side such as
posters on that topic.
Close second bests are www.AOL.com,
www.MSN.com and www.Lycos.com which seem to retrieve about the same
information. AOL also allowed you to
create complicated search queries in its advanced area. You must sign on with AOL.com but since I
already am a member it was not a problem.
AOL uses search.msn.com when it can’t find what it wants. Some others that have extra stuff to look at
are www.AlltheWeb.com with options as news, pictures, video, and “any language”
and the search engine www.NPR.org with radio broadcasts. The NPR engine uses AND or OR functions between multiple words which was too tedious
for long queries. Many give the
sponsored links above the list of hits which are helpful if you want to see
who’s supporting those Web hit sites such as www.Netscape.com and www.Hotbot.com. I found the sponsors helpful when I was
looking for information to use in my Web Quest assignment. Hotbot seems to use
Google and AskJeeves at
times. I was disappointed in that I
couldn’t find where Netscape lists how many hits were obtained but just keeps
you wading through the huge list to see that there were a lot. The search engine Northern Light Power
Search, supposedly best for business applications, is not available without
paying to the general public until July 2004 so I did not include it. Also, I tried Teoma
(www.Teoma.com) and its top web page comes up.
When I selected a query’s hit, the whole screen was taken over by
www.JetSeeker.com and I couldn’t get out of it because it was not in a Window’s
window (beware of this one).
The worst search engine in this category for my search requests was the
Librarian’s Index www.lii.org. This
engine only accesses a very small 13,000 record database that describes other
Web sites and really needs just one word requests to work properly. I often use multiple word requests to find
more specific information. The important
things to look for in a general search engine are how many pages world wide
does it scan to bring you your answers and does it have methods to allow you to
logically select combinations of topic words without using any functions
between the words (they are assumed to be AND but actually give you the best
matches at the top and less percentage matches after the top ones). Some search engines require you to enter the
functions AND, OR, and NOT AND between multiple words but I think that is too
much work for my searches.
General Search Engine Table of Number of Responses
per Query
All URLs in this category
have a prefix of http://www. I use the
tilde label ~ in front of the number when the number of hits is approximate
(the search engine mentions “about”).
|
General
Search Engines/ Search
topics |
Google google.com |
AOL AOL.com |
MSN MSN.com |
AlltheWeb AlltheWeb.com |
NLResearch Search
NPR.org |
Librarian’s
Index lii.org |
Alta
Vista Advanced av.com/ Advanced
or altavista.com |
Lycos Lycos.com |
Netscape Netscape.com |
Hotbot Hotbot.com |
|
Mars
rover design Specifications
Spirit |
~7,800 |
~361 |
361 |
346 |
Only 1
good answer |
Used AND got 2
hits |
~474 |
478 |
I saw
>400 but no total
listed |
476 |
|
explorer
Powell |
~14,800 |
~5,208 |
1,516 |
4,917 |
Used AND
got only 2
hits |
Used AND got 0
hits |
~5,672 |
5,668 |
I saw
>100 but no total
listed |
5,665 |
|
Bush moon
habitat robots future
2005 |
334 |
~208 |
208 |
149 |
Used AND
did got 0
good ones |
Used AND got 0
hits |
~229 but
used msnbc.com |
249 |
I saw a
lot listed |
248 |
|
American
Idol TV show
George Huff |
~10,500 |
~1,290 |
1,259 |
879 |
Listed 6
but only 1 good
one |
Used AND got 0
hits |
~1,464 |
1,484 |
I saw a
lot listed |
1,485
uses tvtome.com |
|
small pox
terrorist |
~2,210 |
~781 |
781 |
569 |
Used OR
to get ~67, AND
gave 0 |
Used AND got 0
hits |
~814 |
826 |
I saw a
lot listed |
824 |
|
apple
dessert |
~1,650 |
~97 |
97 |
75 |
~18 but
not exact
matches |
Used just
got 4
hits |
~121 |
122 |
I saw
about 10 good hits |
122 |
Meta-Search Engines
The best Meta-Search engine for my
purposes was a tie between www.Vivisimo.com and www.Dogpile.com. Vivisimo seems to
have good extensive general coverage of the subject and lists the results in
nicely organized or ranked categories. It gave you the choice of how the search
would be done, by using its Clustering Engine or Content Integrator or
Enterprise Publisher. It also listed
some other useful links to ebay, PubMed
via ClusterMed and to FirstGov. Dogpile does the
same listing of the results in ranked categories but seemed to come up with
some unusual hits that other search engines didn’t find. It also lists the Yellow and White pages
which can be useful in finding a business related to your topic. I liked the links to maps, weather, public
records and classifieds and it has a joke of the day. It also lists other related topic areas to
refine your results.
Metacrawler doesn’t list the number of hits per category but
allows you to look specifically in topical areas as web pages, audio,
multi-media, news, and shopping. SurfWax lists the number of pages it searched to get the
resulting hits and lists what search engines were used to get them. The www.copernic.com was really
www.copernicagentbasic.exe and took too long to download so I did not review
this one. I used www.mamma.com (the
“Mother” of all search engines) instead which was a good one but some of its
listed hits were not accessible (no page available message came up) and
probably not as dependable for listing up-to-date hit pages. The engine www.Ixquick.com listed the number
of best hits out of a number of pages scanned with matching results. I’m not sure how useful the number of pages
scanned is but someone might use it. I
would probably rate the www.mamma.com as
not the best (worst) since I could not depend on all the hit pages to be
currently available although it seemed to have good coverage like the others.
Most of these Meta-Search
engines show you which General Search engines were used to get the hits. Most of the time this information is listed
at the bottom of the results page but some Meta-Search engines list the source
engine right next to the hit itself which could be useful if you want to look
further into the subject area. You can
usually select before the search is done which general search engines you want
to include in the Meta-Search. Advanced
search options are also available with some engines and options as Web, News,
or Extra. Some of the Meta-Search
engines perform clustering which organizes the search results on the fly while
others perform a Content Integrator function which queries many sources at
once. Some search engines look for hits
in a certain amount of time and return what it found instead of doing a total
search no matter how long it takes. I
prefer the total search instead so that I don’t miss anything. Vivisimo produces
clustered results as does Dogpile and Metacrawler where they list the resulting number of hits
per subcategory. This is a really nice
feature to help you focus on just the hit selections you want. The important things to note are how many
different general search engines it uses and how exact is the matching method
(title match, general
Meta-Search Engine Table of Number of Responses per
Query
|
Meta-Search
Engines/ Search
topics |
Vivisimo www.vivisimo.com |
Dogpile Dogpile.com |
Metacrawler Metacrawler.com |
SurfWax www.surfwax.com |
Mamma www.mamma.com |
Ixquick www.ixquick.com |
|
Mars
rover design specifications
Spirit |
163 |
68 |
69 |
58 out of
3,150 pages
searched |
27 |
36 listed
of 1,050 matching
results |
|
explorer
Powell |
157 |
85 |
76 |
79 out of
5,204 pages
searched |
47 |
55 listed
of 7,700 matching
result |
|
Bush moon
habitat robots
future 2005 |
128 |
69 |
59 |
62 out of
210 pages
searched |
32 |
39 listed
of 204 matching
results |
|
American
Idol TV show
George Huff |
164 |
73 but
only 2 relevant
ones |
72 |
58 out of
1,430 pages
searched |
34 |
44 listed
of 1,304 matching
results |
|
small pox
terrorist |
155 |
68 but
only 9 relevant
ones |
66 |
61 out of
930 pages
searched |
34 |
36 listed
of 792 matching
results |
|
|
131 but
only 16 relevant
to query |
62 but
only 7 relevant
ones |
61 but
<20 hits relevant
to query |
51 out of
530 pages
searched |
26 |
39 listed
of 280 matching
results |
News and Media (as listed by Yahoo directories)
Search Engines
These News search engines list
various sources from which to obtain the data such as by newspapers, magazines,
radio, or television. Some let you
access the Web by a general search engine as well. I found that in most cases these News search
engines were good at listing the top stories which is useful if you haven’t
watched or heard the news in awhile.
They were not very good at searching for a general topic unless that
topic has been in the news lately. They
do not go back farther in time than a few years. One had a time limit of 36 months but you
could pick a time period to search within which would be nice if you didn’t
want to get results from other time periods.
Most of these News engines search world news but you could pick a locale
(country, state, or city) in which to search.
I think all of them had a language selection that sometimes was required
to be selected before any searching could be done.
I did not include the News
Link (www.newslink.org) search engine because it required you to select a
specific newspaper, radio or TV station, magazine, or unique source to search
so that the scope of the search would be very limited and did not fit well with
this assignment to test its ability to scan all of the news out there. It allowed you to select the general search
engines you wanted it to use (AltaVista, Big Hub, Excite, Go which is Infoseek, Google, Infohiway, Lycos, Magelean, Webcrawler, and Yahoo).
The Voice of America search
engine listed the top broadcast and press program stories which was good for
current affairs but required you to select the language. I could not get any good results out of it
using multiple word queries because it works best with single word
queries. The www.news.google.com seemed
to only search recent news stories and did not look back a few months or
more. The Publishers List
(www.publist.com) engine requires you to search with a specific title of an
article or book. Since I did not have
one, this search engine produced no results for me. It also needed to have cookies enabled and I
don’t think I do on my computer yet. The
News Directory (www.newsdirectory.com) also required a specific title to search
and I didn’t have one so I didn’t use it.
The only ones that I could effectively use were www.CNN.com,
www.news.google.com, and www.news.yahoo.com.
I think www.CNN.com was the best of all of them because it let you
search the Weather, the World News, and All Politics. It also listed the general search engines that
it uses such as Google, LookSmart,
Gigablast, MSN, Business.com, Open Directory, and Teoma. It also had
some extra features that I had not seen with other News engines.
My top pick or best News search engine by far was
www.CNN.com. It was easy to use and
produced a lot of results. It listed the
top current stories and let you access many other topics such as Science &
Space, law, Health,
Many of the News search
engines did not return results for my long queries and I think I would have
gotten more information back with one or two word queries but I was trying to
compare these with the General search engines so I kept the same queries. I didn’t really have a worst News search
engine but there were some I would probably never use such as Publisher’s List
or News Directory because they required too much input from the person before
the search could be performed.
News Search Engine Table of Number of Responses per
Query
|
News
Search Engines/ Search
topics |
CNN www.CNN.com |
News
yahoo news.yahoo.com |
News
Directory www.newsdirectory.com |
Publishers
List www.publist.com |
Voice of www.voa.news.com |
News Google news.google.com |
|
Mars
rover design specifications
Spirit |
3170 |
One good
hit from |
No
results with this query |
Need
cookies enabled |
40
results under topic Science
& Technology |
1 of 1
hit |
|
explorer
Powell |
5960 |
None |
No
results with this query |
Need
cookies enabled |
No
relevant results but some on
Colin Powell |
No match |
|
Bush moon
habitat robots
future 2005 |
263 |
None |
No
results with this query |
Need
cookies enabled |
No
results using all of the query
words |
No match |
|
American
Idol TV show
George Huff |
4200 |
53 hits
because it’s a current
news topic |
No
results with this query |
Need
cookies enabled |
No
results using all of the query
words |
52
because its been in the news
recently |
|
small pox
terrorist |
2300 |
One
related story about a |
No
results with this query |
Need
cookies enabled |
No
results using all of the query
words |
No match |
|
|
179 |
None |
No
results with this query |
Need
cookies enabled |
No
results using all of the query
words |
No match |
Education Search Engines
The Global School House (www.globalschoolhousenet.org)
search engine and the Federal Resources For Excellence
(www.educationindex.com) search engine did not have a query area but had
everything listed in categories. The
Global School House looked like a good resource for teachers but is not simple
enough for a younger student to browse.
The Federal Resources For Excellence search
engine targets the college students for information on how to get loans, jobs,
research groups to join, tutoring help for college classes, and a coffee shop
for chatting. I found some good
education articles under this one. I
think if I was just starting out in college it would be very helpful. The other search engines allowed you to enter
a query.
The best two were Yahooligans and Ask Jeeves for Kids. Yahooligans first gave a good coverage for the topic
searched but then gave the option to look at more related sites which was very
useful. It also had a place to ask Earl,
to look at a reference section and any other information that Yahooligans had
on the topic. I think Ask Jeeves for Kids
(www.ajkids.com) was good because it had related questions about the topic such
as “Would you like to see a movie on this, or a definition of the search word,
or a timeline, or a report?” It also
listed where it got its information (the source) with a link to go there for
more details. I don’t think there was
any Worst engine because they had different approaches to the way they listed,
and users would access, that information which made it hard to compare them on
equal ground. Each of the Education
search engine URLs below should be preceded by “http://www.”
to get to the site.
Education Search Engine Table of Number of Responses
per Query
|
Education
Search Engines/ Search
topics |
Global
School House globalschoolhousenet.org |
Federal
Resources For
Excellence eduationindex.com |
Yahooligans yahooligans.com |
Ask Jeeves for kids ajkids.com |
Academic
Info academicinfo.net/ index.html
|
Education
planet educationplanet.com |
INFOMINE ucr.edu |
|
Internet
learning |
No search
entry area |
No search
entry area |
34 |
19 total |
Sponsored
by |
9799 |
The |
|
computer
learning |
No search
entry area |
No search
entry area |
13 |
31 total |
It had no
query area |
5533 |
It
responds by identifying |
|
math
games |
No search
entry area |
No search
entry area |
75 |
61 total |
but lists
degrees available |
2387 |
an area
on campus where |
|
calculus |
No search
entry area |
No search
entry area |
4 |
318 total |
and has
many topics to |
98 |
the information can be found. |
|
electronic
learning |
No search
entry area |
No search
entry area |
3 |
18 total |
browse through. |
5208 |
It had 3
math game hits, |
|
math
tutor |
No search
entry area |
No search
entry area |
6 |
28 total |
|
909 |
calculus
practice sites, actual math
tutors & Learning or Computer
centers. |
Medical Search Engines
One of the
best Medical search engines was Healthfinder at www.Healthfinder.gov/default.htm
because it narrowed the query responses to only good matches. It had a Health library to select from and a
place to find healthcare organizations as well.
It listed recent health news and current health topics which were easy
to browse. The other best search engine
was Achoo at www.achoo.com/main.asp
which was also good at returning many responses to look through. The Achoo engine
called up another engine named NCBI PubMed (a widely
used and respected medical search engine) and used it for the queries.
The top window gave you many choices about where to find information
such as in reference sources or a Human health directory instead of depending
on searching the web with a topic. It
also listed business companies and health products directories. It also gave you several different medical
search engines to pick from such as Medline (NLM), Merck manual as well as the
Internet.
I found that the Nurse
Friendly web site had a lot of choices and it was difficult to find its web
search engine link in the middle of the page on the left. It was also case sensitive meaning “west nile” returned no hits but “
Medical Search Engine Table of Number of Responses
per Query
|
Medical
Search Engines/ Search
topics |
Healthfinder healthfinder.gov/ default.htm |
Health
Web healthweb.org |
Achoo achoo.com/ main.asp |
MEDLINES –
The Nurse Friendly nursefriendly.com/medicine/ |
healthcentre.org.uk/ hc/index.html |
|
Small pox
terrorist |
26 |
3 good
hits |
6798 used questia.com |
5816 |
1 hit |
|
Mad cow
disease |
6 |
No hits |
1521 hits |
3 but not all on topic |
30
irrelevant hits |
|
Heart
murmur |
183 |
49 hits |
2063 hits |
4 |
9 good
hits |
|
Varicose
veins |
2 |
No hits |
11525
hits |
17 |
2 good
hits |
|
|
3 |
23 but
not all |
1342 hits |
8 |
No hits |
|
Lyme’s disease |
5 |
229 for
disease only some
for Lyme’s disease |
5798 hits |
3 |
30 hits
on neurological disorders
but not only on Lyme’s disease |
The Worst Search Engine Overall in each category was listed
above. It is not practical to compare
the Education and Medical search engines with the General,