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Assignment 6: Internet Search Engine Comparison
I just inherited a bunch of family photographs from my grandmother so I wanted to find out the best way to preserve them. I searched for information using five search engines: Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Clusty, and Zapmeta. I searched using the words -- preserving photographs – which produced 2,080,000 results. Putting quotes around the words (“preserving photographs”) produced 800 results. With either search, the first 10 results were pretty much the same. Most of these first 10 results were relevant, especially one from the American Museum of Photography. I used the same search terms as I did with the Google search so that I could easily compare the two engines. Without quotes around preserving photographs, I got 2,080,000 results, the same as with Google, and with quotes I got 1,490 results, about 600 more than the same search with Google. Of the top ten results, about 5 were the same as the top ten produced by the Google search. As with the Google search, I found the top 10 results to be relevant and useful. I liked that the Yahoo results are numbered and that each link includes a small icon that lets you open the link in a new window. I decided to try searching using a question: How do I preserve my photos? This gave me 1,200,000 results. I was able to narrow my search however by using a menu called Narrow Search on the right-hand side of the page. Some of my options included Preserving Photographs, Photo Preservation, and Preserving Old Photographs. I chose Preserving Photographs since that is what I’ve searched on using the other search engines. This gave me 390,400 results. The first result was the American Museum of Photography website that I had found the most useful in my search so far. One feature that I really liked about this site was that each result had a binocular icon which showed a small image of the website when I let my cursor rest on it. I searched using the words preserving photographs and got 2,189,995 results; I got 3,464 results when I put quotes around these words. The top ten results were similar to the ones I got with Yahoo and were all relevant. The left-hand side of the page showed expandable cluster topics. Each of the subtopics had a manageable number of results – I chose to look at Conservation, which had 11. Some neat features of this website were the icons next to each result. When you click on the magnifying glass icon, a banner-size box showing the website pops up. There is also a Venn diagram icon that highlights which cluster the result belongs to in the left-hand cluster box. Again I did the same search that I did with the other search engines, getting 65 results for unquoted preserving photographs and 67 results for “preserving photographs”. One disadvantage to this search engine is that the first four links are all sponsored links such as amazon.com. It had several advantages though. It produced a manageable number of results and it has a snapshot option which when turned on shows a thumbnail of each website next to the link itself. I also liked being given options with which to sort the data including relevance (default), popularity, title, source, and domain.
All five search engines gave me similar “top ten” results but I think zapmeta worked best. I like knowing I can look through a list of results from beginning to end. When you search something and receive 2,000,000 results, it’s just meaningless. Also, since all five engines produced similar results, it came down to special features that helped determine which search engine I preferred. Zapmeta’s snapshot function plus its sorting ability were the most useful functions to me. Of the five search engines, Google’s search was the most “barebones” which surprised me since I usually think of it as the gold standard of search engines. I think some of the simple features found in the other websites, such as providing snapshot views and numbering results, would be an added bonus to Google’s results.
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