Thing #7

I spent some time looking at the different search engines and how they are alike/different. First of all, I didn't know that most of them existed! Beyond Google and Yahoo, I had heard of Dogpile from my husband, but the other search engines were new to me.

A few observations:
Each of the search engines had a different way of displaying results. This was interesting. I was used to the lists posted on Google and Yahoo, but I thought some of the other sites were more creative. Kartoo displayed their results using a web-type graphic, Search Me displayed its results like pages in a book. The one I liked the best was Viewzi, which displayed results across the page, giving each result its own "square" with a picture and heading.

I experimented with several of these search engines by putting in the same search term/phrase to see what the results would be. Once again, each one had different results. Once again, I liked the results displayed by Viewzi the best. I was looking for background information on Obama's cabinet members (I like to talk to students about the "spoils system" in the White House office v. the Cabinet.) Viewzi's results were from what I would have considered more reputable newspapers, websites, etc. For example one of the top results was from the New York Times, and it had exactly what I was looking for. Using the same search phrase with Search Me, I got an article from the Flint Times as one of the top results, and another result was a sight called "The Obama File", which is completely devoted to discrediting the President. The sight discusses how Obama is not a natural born citizen, how he has a lot of skeletons in his closet but that know one knows about because he has a team of people who have erased any trace of this info. from the web and all other sources. Anyway, I was really turned off by this.

I also took a look at Polycom.com where you can do a search using two search engines at once. I thought this was very ingenious! I did the same search on Obama's cabinet and could see the difference in the results on the same screen.

Beyond that, I did take a look at the articles and graphs that compared the various search engines,but I did not take away as much from this. I am still a little overwhelmed at the volume of information available for each topic we have covered from month to month, so the speed of one search engine versus another isn't a big deal to me.

I will definitely check out some of these different search engines more. I want to see which ones will provide me with the best results for my needs.