Fiction and Nonfiction Videos

Beyond Bare Bones

This section of the tutorial is a list of recommended information and tutorial sites about searching. The tutorial I have just completed has been very helpful in obtaining information about conducting searches and in gaining insight about just how those search engines go about finding the requested sites. I hope to continue in this quest of learning different methods of searching the Internet.

Search Engine Graveyard

Unfortunately some search engines just can't survive with the few mega-name searchers that exist. They must have some unique feature that causes them to stand out, or they will be "eaten up" by the other bigger dogs, as is the case with AllTheWeb and AltaVista. I was not aware that AskJeeves was gone. I think we used to use that with our students because of the ease of typing in questions.

Yahoo!

Here we have another engine created by graduate students. It first started out as a subject directory and in 2002 made the shift to subject directory/search engine. The main directory page offers many links. The main search page, in addition to search technology, has links to email, breaking news, and allows searching for images, audio, news, and shopping. A unique feature of the advanced search page is that it provides product web search options.

Clusty

Clusty is one that I have not previously heard of. It is a metasearcher that searches in Ask, GigaBlast, LookSmart, MSN, Open Directory, and Wisenut. The unique thing about Clusty is that it "clusters" search results by topic instead of having to sort through too many results. The advanced page allows user to turn off/on a filter for offensive content. When I did the assignment at the bottom of the tutorial (I had nver used this metasearcher before) the engine first brought up all the hits, and to the left were the list of clusters. It's kind of like a "Did you mean..." feature because it narrows your results in a way. In the example WMD, there were several things that WMD could stand for. It was very helpful to have the search engine attempt to sipher through the results for me. It actually did some of the work.

Google

It was pretty amazing to learn that Google was created by graduate students. I mean how do you even go about knowing how to create a search engine? Google is the largest of the search engines. I think this is pretty apparent when it becomes part of the current vernacular--I know I've told curious students to "Google it." I guess that makes this NOUN a VERB! Google's attributes that attract users are its clean, easy-to-use interface and its return of highly relevant results. Returns are based on the sites linking to them and their popularity. An interesting aspect of Google is that it "caches" links meaning that it saves a copy of each web page visited. So, if there is a site that no longer exists, you may still be able to find a copy of it using Google's "cached" link. Google searches in its own database and in the Google Directory. Both the main search page and the advanced search page support the Boolean operators. I know Google is not all there is out there, but, as I said before, Google is set as my homepage and is usually my first stop in my searching attempts.