Best Search Engines

Medical Search Engines: In this category, I rank MedlinePlus at http://www.medlineplus.com as the best medical search engine. This is a service of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Health. The homepage is well organized, so it is easy to know where to start looking. The pages can be viewed in English or in Spanish, an added plus. There is a link to recent news articles, which I found very helpful. WebMD, at http://webmd.com is probably the best-known medical search engine, but there were annoying ads as well as not being as cleanly organized as MedlinePlus. It was much easier to find drug information at MedlinePlus than at WebMD.

Kids Search Engines: Of the kids search engines I looked at, I would rank both Yahooligans! http://yahooligans.com and Ask Jeeves Kids http://www.ajkids.com as very good. The format on both is easy to use and colorful. I was disappointed with the results of the search term I entered. Yahooligans! did not find any results for pacemaker; Ask Jeeves did, but the link to the inventor did not even mention the pacemaker. So before sending students to these sites, it would be a good idea to be sure that they will be able to access information. My favorite kids search engine is First Gov for Kids, http://www.kids.gov. This site is well organized and easy to use, with good links to kid-friendly information. This will be a good resource for teachers and students alike.

News Search Engines: CNN, http://www.cnn.com and Google, http://www.google.com were both very easy to navigate and find desired information on. The single advantage that CNN has over Google here is that if you saw something on CNN, you have the option to search the CNN site directly. Google shows the time of the most recent update on the top stories, which could be helpful in some instances.

Government Search Engines: Hands down FirstGov http://www.firstgov.gov/ and FirstGove for Kids, http://www.kids.gov win this category. The sites are very easy to use and provide very useful information on the home pages. Google does have a government search, http://www.google.com/unclesam, but there is no direction—simply the search box. Search Engine Watch says that searches from this site are limited to US Government web pages, but the Google site doesn’t indicate this. However, their name is very nicely done in stars and stripes!

General Search Engines: My favorite here is Google, http://www.google.com, with AltaVista, http://www.altavista.com a close second. I like how easy it is on AltaVista to set content filters. Both offer the ability to translate text from one language into another and the ability to view web pages in another language. But what makes Google tops is that it will solve mathematical equations when entered into the search box! Both are very easy to use, return a lot of hits, and offer many different directories and tools to assist in your search. Searches are very fast and provide a lot of information. To narrow results, using advance search options is highly recommended.