Thing #19: Search Engines

We have all used search engines to find information on the Web. You may use Google, Yahoo, Ask, Bing, or any number of other search engines every day. In Thing #19, we’ll be looking at these, meta search engines, and exploring some lesser known, specialized search engines.

According to Wikipedia, a search engine is “designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files.“ The most commonly used search engines include Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Bing.  Infopeople, a staff training site from the California State Library, offers a nice comparison of search engines and their features on this chart.

Meta Search Engines

A meta search engine searches other search engines. Your search terms are searched in several popular search engines and the results combined in one set of results. Metasearch engines include metacrawler, ixquick, and zapmeta. The meta search engine Yometa searches Google, Bing and Yahoo, reporting the results in a Venn-diagram type display.

Specialized Search Engines

There are also hundreds of specialized search engines – ones that search for a particular type of media (like podcasts), content (like blog posts or tweets), subjects or even geographic areas.

Here’s just a few:

• Find Sounds for sound effects
• Technorati to search blog posts
• SlideFinder searches Microsoft PowerPoint presentations
• Topsite claims to find the Best sites for a particular subject
• TOPSY offers real-time searching of the social web and can limit searches to only tweets
• Rollyo allows you to create a custom search engine using sites you trust

Even More Search Engines

Internet Consultant Phil Bradley’s list of 150+ general web search engines can be found here and his website has more helpful information, including a list of search engines by country.   NoodleTools, an academic site, offers starting points for different types of searches here.

  

Thing #18 Activity: Explore Search Engines

 Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Perform a search on any topic using your favorite search engine. Note your results.

2. Select another search engine and repeat the same search. Note your results.

3. Select a meta search engine and repeat the search a third time. Note your results.

4. Write a blog post about your experience:  Which search engines did you select?  Compare your search results. Which meta search engine did you use?  What results did you get? Be sure to tag your post as “Thing 19”.

  

Additional Optional Resources:

Ask.com com offer s a searchable help database, and Frequently Asked Questions, here.

Bing offers a help page here.

For Google web search help, click here. For information on Google’s search features, click here.

Help for searching in Yahoo is here.

For general tips, watch CommonCraft's "Web Search Strategies in Plain English" here.