Troy Jensen

Best in General Search

Gold Medal Winner - Excite – This search engine is a good search engine with an attractive front page that can be personalize by the user to include the latest on their desired topics. Once entering a search, it provides a great with a good selection of “Are you looking for?” help on the left side. It also gives a good number of sites on the first page. Also, when a user types in anything of the adult nature, it has a warning before showing any search results.

Silver Medal Winner - Yahoo – This search engine is easy to use and gives good websites in response to general searches. Yahoo allows personalization of the front page of its search engine which gives the user updated information on their desired topics. It comes in a close second to Excite because it is not as attractive nor informative on its searches.

Best in Media

Gold Medal Winner - Lycos – This is hands down the best media search engine. Even though on the front search page it only gives the option of searching for photos, once you select a search topic, the first results page will give you the option to search for audio and video of the same topic. It does a great job of listing and showing the results for each of the three medias.

Silver Medal Winner - AltaVista – For media, AltaVista gives the most on options when searching. A user can search for images, MP3/Audio, and video from the front search page. Most of the other search engines only give the images search option. It also gives good results but not quite as good as Lycos.

Best in News

Gold Medal Winner – Yahoo - With news, there is not a big difference in search engines. It may depend on the topic. However, the topics I selected did not generate too much difference among the engines. Despite that, Yahoo was easy to navigate and gave good results.

Silver Medal Winner - Google – Google came in a close second for its easy of use but the others were not far behind in the capabilities. Each search engine gave similar results which made it a little more difficult to choose which are the best.

Best in Medical

Gold Medal Winner- WebCrawler – This search engine was better mainly because of its clarity in providing quality results. Also, it had a good section labeled “Refine Your Results” which gave very good suggestions. It was also easy to use.

Silver Medal Winner - Excite – This engine was just as good as WebCrawler and at its on help section “Are you looking for?” but the suggestions are not as good as WebCrawler’s. The results were good links to quality websites. Again, the site is easy to read, use, and its attractive to the eye.

Best in Shopping

Gold Medal Winner - Yahoo – This engine is a good for shopping because it lists a picture of the product along with the website to find it. At the top of the first results page, it list two websites that are stores which may have the product you are looking. It is easy to navigate through the results to find the specific product.

Silver Medal Winner - Google – Its shopping search engine is actually called Froogle but it does a good job as well. This engine also provides pictures for specific products but does not provide general website at the very top. They are toward the bottom on the left.