Project #15

Search Engines

For Project 15, I had the opportunity to learn tons of information about different search engines and what they were most useful for. The first search engine I researched was Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine or answer engine. Wolfram Alpha is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from externally sourced "curated data", rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might. Wolfram Alpha would be most useful for help with calculations, such as math practice. The second search engine is yahoo. Yahoo is one of the Internet's leading search engines. It is also the largest Web portal, providing links to thousands of other websites. These links include sites from the Yahoo directory as well as news stories that are updated several times a day. In my personal opinion, I think Yahoo would be most useful for searching for the latest news. Besides being a portal and search engine, Yahoo offers several other services as well.

The third search engine I researched was business.com. Business.com was started in 1999 as a search engine for business and corporations. So, as you can imagine, business.com would be most useful for searching for different businesses and corporations around the world. The fourth search engine I researched was Ask.com. Ask.com is a search engine that let you search by asking questions and responds with what seems to be the right answer to everything. Ask.com would be most useful for anyone that may have a question that they are unsure about. The next search engine I researched was AOL search. AOL Search provides users with editorial listings that have Google's crawler-based index. I find AOL search to be very interesting because the internal version of AOL Search provides links to content only available within the AOL online service. In this way, you can search AOL and the entire web at the same time. For the sixth search engine, I researched Hotbot. HotBot provides easy access to the web's three major crawler-based search engines: Yahoo, Google and Teoma. Unlike a Meta search engine, it cannot blend the results from all of these crawlers together. Nevertheless, it's a fast, easy way to get different web search opinions in one place. Hotbot would be most useful for someone would want to get different web search opinion all at once.

For my seventh search engine, I researched Live search. Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search) is the name of Microsoft's web search engine, successor to MSN Search, designed to compete with the industry leaders Google and Yahoo. The search engine offers some innovative features, such as the ability to view additional search results on the same web page (instead of needing to click through to subsequent search result pages) and the ability to adjust the amount of information displayed for each search-result. Live search is most useful because it allows the user to save searches and see them updated automatically on Live.com. The final search engine I researched is Alltheweb.com. Powered by Yahoo, you may find AllTheWeb a lighter, more customizable and pleasant "pure search" experience than you get at Yahoo itself. The focus is on web search, but at the same time news, picture, video, MP3 and FTP search is also offered.

For more information on where I researched my information on the different search engines, visit Search Engine Land and Top 10 Search Engines