Jason Godfroy

SLM 521 summer 2005

May 21, 2005

Search Engine Survey

General Search Engines:

I tested seven different search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, alltheweb.com, Teoma, and Hotbot. I have been a habitual user of Google and I was expecting Google to come out on top. It performed well, but was not my overall choice for number one.

First Place: Teoma. I really liked the way Teoma breaks down the search into three categories. There is a list of the web pages that fit your search, called the Results section. Then there is a list called Refine, where Teoma gives you a list of possible key words that could be added to your list to make it more specific. And there is a section called Resources, that gives a list of ‘collections from experts and enthusiasts.’ I haven’t yet downloaded the Teoma search bar, but I will soon.

Second Place: Tie between Google and Ask Jeeves. This surprised me. I have shied away from Ask Jeeves for a while now, but I was surprised at how well it performed on the searches. Google’s performance was not surprising. I am very familiar with Google searching. I like the way it lists the web pages. I love the uncluttered feel of it. (A very big drawback for me with the Ask Jeeves site—I just always feel like there is too much on the page and I am missing something.) Ask Jeeves returned many good web sites for my queries.

Metasearch Engines:

I tested seven different search engines: Dogpile, vivisimo, Kartoo, Surfwax, Clusty, and Excite. I have not used many of these and was not all that impressed with them as a whole. I like Excite the least, becoming constantly confounded by its insistence to place cookies on my machine and the cluttered layout of the page—and the results were not inspiring. Bleach!!! OK….On to the good sites… I really liked the way Kartoo had its website visually display the results of the queries. I thought that there are many people of a special disposition who might find that type of visual result appealing. It did not, however, return the best pages for me.

First Place: Tie: Mamma.com and Vivisimo.com. I had a hard time finding a big difference between these two pages. They each had individual strengths. For example, they both had a section that gave you a list of possible ways to refine your search. The pages were clean and uncluttered. And the resulting web pages were good. If I had to choose, I would choose Mamma.com over Vivisimo.com, but only slightly.

Second Place: A very close second place goes to Dogpile.com. In fact this could easily have been a three-way tie for first place, but I thought that was coping out a bit. Again, this page had a section suggesting other words/ links associations to choose from. The only difference between this and the above two web sites was the web sites returned in the survey. I didn’t get the same selection. I had to do more searching on this page to find what I was looking for.

Shopping Search Engines:

I tested seven different search engines: Bizrate.com, Dealtime.com, Froogle, Kelkoo.com, Shopping.msn.com, Cnet.com, Overstock.com. I have used many of these web sites before, so I was not too surprised by the results. I must say that Shopping.msn.com was by far the worst site of any site that I looked at for any search. In many cases, it didn’t even return a list of items I searched for. It returned items that weren’t even close to my search. Very alarming.

First Place: Froogle.com. This was no surprise really. Froogle.com has a very familiar set up. I like Google, so I knew I would like Froogle. It consistently returned items that I searched for. Many of the sites returned items I searched for plus accessories for the item, but Froogle.com had a higher percentage of actual items.

Second Place: Bizrate.com. Somehow, I forgot about this site. I have used it in the past, but have not for a while. One of the pluses for Bizrate.com was the ranking feature. You can rank the items returned by price, popularity, or ranking. I was unsure of how they ranked them (what type of scientific process was used), but for items that I am not familiar with and want to do comparison shopping, the rankings were good. That also brings me to another site. Cnet.com is an excellent site for electronics shopping. It did not make the top two because of its limits (to electronics). But, if you ever want to comparison shop anything techy, this is the place to go. It ranks items and has the ability to sort by price including a feature that calculates shipping costs!

News Search Engines:

I tested seven different search engines: news.google.com, news.yahoo.com, news.altavista.com, daypop.com, ananova.com. net2one.com, newsknife.com. There was a big difference between the top and the bottom of these sites. As for the bad, I could not get net2one.com to work. First, it loaded in French, then I switched it over to English (an easy enough process), but once I clicked on a link, it reverted back to French. Constantly switching to English is a hassle. Ananova.com and newsknife.com were not really search engines. They posted the lasted news and broke the news down into categories, but there was not place to search for a topic. You had to click through. I did not rate them highly for that reason.

First Place: news.altavista.com

Second Place: news.google.com

Third Place News.yahoo.com

There was so little difference between these search engines that in order to separate them and rank them, I find that I am splitting hairs. They all came up with the same stories for any given search. Altavista wins, only because I like the format of the list. For example, if a certain story was published five hours ago, Altavista would write out “found 5 hours ago’. The other two site would give the date and time found. That meant that I had to do the mental calculations. (It is not that difficult to do, I know. But, now maybe you can see why I said ‘splitting hairs.’) So, I would have to say that any of the three sites above would work well for all news purposes.

Kids Search Engines:

I tested five different search engines: ajkids.com, kidsclick.org, yahooligans.com, diddabdoo.com, and netnanny.com. Most of the searches engines performed well, except for diddabdo.com. That one actually returned information that I didn’t search for. As a search engine for kids, I just cannot see how that can be helpful. Kids may or may not be very computer savvy, and if they are not, that site cannot possibly help them find anything.

First Place: yahooligans.com. This site had a slight edge over second and third place. I like the filtering system and the fact that the searches returned what I was looking for. Sometimes kids need help searching the web. They don’t know all of the synonyms or other words to use in a search. I felt that yahooligan.com did a good job of giving a list of possible alternate directions for searches.

Second Place: Tie between kidsclick.org and ajkids.com. I knew that ajkids.com was a very good search engine. It is one of the search engines that I have allowed my students to use in the past (I know shame on me. I was young and innocent. I don’t let them anymore. I now create a list of web links for them.) I like it a lot. It does have one drawback. It doesn’t return a large list of possible sites to choose from. Some searches resulted in an immediate return of one web page. The pages were very engaging and interesting, but what happens if that is not what the student is looking for. And that is not an area that kidsclick.org had a problem with. It returned a very solid list of sites and alternate directions for queries.