Polly Fasick
SLM 521
May 31, 2009
Polly’s Picks for
Best Search Engines
After exploring search
engines, here are my picks for the top two in 6 categories. The search engine categories I chose were
general, news, meta, government, kid safe, and most fun.
Best General Search
Engines (no surprise picks here)
Google is the largest, most
popular search engine on the internet and my favorite. Google’s database is the
largest on the web, comprising billions of web pages. Extremely fast searches deliver consistently
relevant information. Searches use a
PageRank technology and respond to queries with info ranked most important and
useful.
Yahoo is not as large as
Google, but a close second. It also offers quick matching responses to text
queries. As queries are entered in text
box, it also allows users to narrow their search, by listing ways information
is organized.
Best News Search Engines
Yahoo! News provides a hugely
comprehensive search of up-to-date world news, photos, opinions and analysis.
From odd news to most popular headlines, you can find it all here. Also offers searches of comics, video, weather,
business, entertainment, sports, politics, health, travel, science, ETC. It’s a quick, excellent source of news
information.
Much like Yahoo! News, World
News Network offers a comprehensive search of breaking news along with a
gathering of news information by subject and region categories. Stories can be tracked by Sun-Mon archives,
as well as retrieved from archives by year.
Best Meta-Search
Engines
This one is new to me, but I
really like it. It’s quick and delivers good, relevant information. When you
type in your search query, it returns a suggestion list of results in the left
margin. I found organized margin
suggestions (which can be organized by clusters, sources, and sites) to be very
helpful.
This one is a lot like Clusty
and “fetches” good, quick results. Also
provides search suggestions. In
addition, it labels sponsored ad links.
I’m not crazy about the name though.
Best Government
Search Engines
USA Search Gov provides a
quick search to official
http://dir.yahoo.com/government/
Searches Yahoo web database
or directory categories for US and World Government information. An amazing
collection of government information can be found
here.
Best Kid Safe Search
Engines
Formally Yahooligans, this is
a great search engine for kids. It’s safe and appropriate for children and is
educational as well as entertaining for children aged 6 through 12. It is visually
interesting, complete with sound effects and easy to use. Fun game links as
well as study sites and links for adults.
Once known as Ask Jeeves for
Kids, this is a fun and unique search engine for kids. You can enter a question and Ask Kids will
return web links to an answer. It’s also
safe, educational, and entertaining.
Major categories are schoolhouse, games, videos, music, and movies.
Most Fun Search
Engines – The two search engines that I had
the most fun with.
Entertaining Video
This is an amazing
search engine for videos—over 35 million hours of audio clips and video files
are included in search. I had fun with this search engine. I entered an obscure Italian movie I saw in
1972 and I got back 457 hits. I wasted a
lot of time on this one!
Fun Alternative
KartOO is a meta search
engine that offers a fun alternative way to search. Search results are displayed as miniature
thumbnail versions of the web page results.
I had fun visually searching pages by scanning images. I entered my daughter’s name and had fun
looking at scrapbook like pages! If
you’re not in a hurry, you could have more fun searching this way.