Jeff Ziegler
August 30, 2009
SLM 521
Search Engines
Below I have selected search engines that I feel are most useful in the education setting. I have split them into five categories. These categories are: news, images, meta, medical, and general.
NEWS
http://news.google.com/
Google News is a very user friendly search engine. Not only does it allow you to search through thousands of news sources across the web. It also provides users with various topics from which to search from, including, on its home page, the top stories from around the world.
I researched Pope Benedict and directly in .17 seconds had 3,813 results including some that had just been posted three hours prior to my search.
http://news.yahoo.com/
Yahoo News is very similar to Google News providing the ability to search within more specific categories. It also provides the user with the most popular searches by other users at that moment. Along with providing users with many sources of news, it also allows users to see weather conditions in the area. Yahoo also incorporates Yahoo Full Coverage which makes searching more specific items easier.
GENERAL
http://www.exalead.com/search/
Claiming to have over 8 billion searchable pages, Exalead seems to be the largest after Google and Yahoo search engines. Allows for various geographic and language options through advance search. Allows user to modify their favorite bookmarks on Exalead homepage.
http://www.bing.com/
Bing is a very new and advanced search engine. It has a very different feel and more sophisticated lay out then the usual search engine.
IMAGES
http://www.picsearch.com/
Picsearch claims to be the best search engine for images, pictures, and animation. With over 3,000,000,000 pictures to search through, I’d say they can back up the claim. Picsearch is very child friendly with their advanced filtering system which allows children to surf the web while all offensive material is filtered out. It is a very simple search engine which would allow students to easily find images.
http://www.altavista.com/image/default
AltaVista allows a user to start their search more advanced from the beginning with choosing the size, color, and sources to crawl through. It is also child friendly with a Family Filter that can be selected to be on or off.
MEDICAL
http://www.healthline.com/
Healthline is a very useful and informative health search engine and medical information. Allows users to search through their own symptoms and gives possible diagnosis. Informs user if the article was Doctor-reviewed or not. Also gives users possible products for their medical needs.
http://omnimedicalsearch.com/
Voted by About.com as one of the 5 top Medical Search engines, OmniMedicalSearch seems to be a very reliable, user friendly search engine. It also includes MedPro which is a more advanced search for Medical Professionals looking for articles in more specific medical resources.
http://www.dogpile.com/
Dogpile is the Godfather of all metasearch engines. Its searches incorporate the most relevant searches from Yahoo!, Google, Bing, and Ask. This search engine brings the most relevant and specific information to your screen without any overlap. Searching more engines at once seems to be a very good idea.
http://zuula.com/
Zuula is a newer metasearch engine which allows users to see the most relevant searches from 9 of the most popular search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Alexa, Exalead, Gigablast, Entireweb, Mahalo, and Mojeek. It also allows users to add and delete search engines to choose from. This is a very user friendly metasearch engine that really helps users find what they are looking for.