Google web searches

Wow, what's the collective noun for search engines? A plethora? A deluge? A string? I had never heard of some of these - Carrot, Clusty, and even Exalead. For fear of this being the longest blogpost in the history of Sheepshifter, here's just a few comments. Loved the Google wonderwheel, which is a good complement to student mindmapping and a huge help in refining topics and choosing keywords. I also particularly liked the Google timeline, which went right up to October 2009 with information on the swine flu pandemic. I didn't like Quintura's cloud tag, which seemed too whimsical, but Carrot, Clusty and iBoogie seemed no-nonsense and provided good responses to my searches. I particularly liked Yahoo, which I use for webmail, but have never explored its possibilities - the Search Pad feature is fantastic - I could see that really taking off, again particularly with secondary and uni students, and I can't think why other search engines haven't thought of this before. Bing was a disappointment mainly because the previews on the right hand side quite often showed "no information available" and the ones that did have a preview weren't particularly useful. I much preferred Exalead - I liked the Advanced search opening up in the same window, and especially liked the thumbnails. It's interesting to see how important web design now is in appealing to users - just like judging a book by its cover really. I'll definitely use Exalead again, it gave me good results with no unnecessary frills.

Dogpile has been around for many moons, and was always a favourite metasearch engine when I worked in schools, but I was sad to see the dog had been updated for a less friendly looking one, and was no longer animated, so that when you clicked on "Go fetch" it just remained seated behind its computer - maybe we can campaign for the old dog's return. It's still as good as ever though, as is Metacrawler, although that now has a "dated" look about it.

This particular module would be perfect as part of Reference Two training. So many of our patrons (and staff) just do basic Google searches without ever knowing about all these other fantastic search engines, and indeed without ever knowing about all the added extras that Google can offer. Just as Google has become the search engine of choice, it seems that after initial mistrust, wikipedia is gaining a place as the encyclopedia of choice, purely because of its ease of access and breadth of content, even if the accuracy of that content may be questionable at times. I am watching future progress with interest.