Thing 6. Beyond Google: Other Search Engines

Google may be first choice for searching, but there are other search engines that may produce useful results. How each search engine finds its results is a big secret, but you can look at the results returned to determine which is most useful for your purpose. Your searching will be more efficient and return more results if you take a few minutes to compare the search results from various search engines (Google, Ask, Yahoo, MSN) and metasearch engines (Clusty, Dogpile). Different search engines may be better for certain types of searches.

Activities
1. Watch this short video about Web Search Strategies from Common Craft:



2. Run the same searches in more than one search engine and compare the results. Try Ask.com, Yahoo!, MSN, or another one you know and use. Use both broad terms (eg cardinal) and narrower terms (cardinal baseball). How did the results compare?
3. These tools can make the comparison easier:

• This tool shows results from LiveSearch, Google, and Yahoo. It gives Best Results, but also shows unique hits from each search engine.
• This guy has a way to show Google and Yahoo results side-by-side.
• This tool gives an interesting visualization of Google (top) and Yahoo (bottom) results.

4. Meta search engines they make it easy to send a query to several search engines at once. DogPile and Clusty are two to try.
5. Visual search engines display results in a more graphical format. Try your search in these search engines: Kartoo displays a visual map of results. Quintura gives both a graphical result as tag cloud and a list.
6. This is a different approach to visual display of information. Just for fun, try MusicPlasma.

Blog Prompts
Some ideas when you blog.

• How do the search engine results compare to the database results? Did you get similar or different results from different search engines? Meta-search engines?
• Are there different features offered by various engines which you like or dislike?
• Did this exercise change your opinion about any of the engines you tried?
• Did you try MusicPlasma? What did you think?