Search Engines are the most widely used tools to search the Internet. From specific image searches to general web searches, engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Hotbot are used by millions of people to find information on the World Wide Web. Although these search engines use similar methods, there are many distinct features unique to each search engine.

Google-

As one of the most popular search engine in use today, Google is bigger, better, faster, more relevant in returns, and richer in search features than any of its competitors (websearch.about.com). Google was born out of a lab in Stanford in 1998, and has been growing successfully ever since. By as early as 1999 Google was already the most popular search engine on the web. Cnet's Ultimate Guide to Search, praises Google, “In our tests, Google scored the highest relevancy rating and returned the lowest number of broken links of all the sites we tested. Even Better, we love Google’s cache function (www.cnet.com).” Using a cache function Google actually saves a copy of each page it indexes. As a result, Google can show copies of links that no longer exist. While this is generally a helpful feature, users must remember that they may not always be looking at the most recent update of a webpage (www.pcworld.com). Google Image search is a valuable resource for searching nearly 330,000,000 images from all over the web. This image search only enhances Google’s reputation as a comprehensive search engine.
The real key to Googles success is it’s innovative “Page Rank” technology. Within its full index of over 560 million pages and its partial index of another 500 million, Google maintains high result relevance by unique page rank technology. As explained by Don Willmont from ZD net reviews, “PageRank evaluates how many other pages link to the pages in its search results and assumes the pages with the most inbound links are probably the best. The results prove the theory works (www.zdnet.com).” Google operates with such precision that it even offers an “I’m feeling lucky” button that takes the user directly to the first search result site, on the assumption that this site is best suited for the users search.
In addition to cache function and page rank technology, google also offers benefits similar to other search engines. Google allows for both Boolean searching and directory browsing. Google also offers a place where users can post and read comments in Usenet discussion forums. These forums are quite extensive, offering over 700 million messages spanning a 20 year period, and are a useful tool for finding information about a wide range of topics including; business, news, science, health, recreation, and many more (google.com).

Hotbot-

Hotbot began in 1996 as part of Wired's online services and is now owned by Lycos. Although owned by Lycos, Hotbot is still an independent search engine with distinct advantages and capabilities. From its homepage Hotbot users can customize their search by date, language, category, return results, and file type (mp3, Javascript, video, image). Users can even go further and define an advanced search by such options as; page depth, word stemming, word filter, and domain location. These extensive custom search options make Hotbot a great search engine for getting specific results for a narrow search. Such advanced search options also allow the user to search for more than just web pages, one can search audio, video, and JavaScript files all in one search.
Top Results on Hotbot are a result of "direct hit" technology. Whereas it used to depend solely on Inktomi, Hotbot now uses direct hit to return it's most popular results and inktomi to return the rest (searchenginewatch.com/sereport). As explained in the March issue of The search engine report, "Direct Hit is a system that measures what pages users select from search results and roughly how long they spend visiting these pages. In a very simplistic explanation, the more "popular" pages as measured by these factors rise to the top of the list (searchenginewatch.com/sereport)
Each of these three search engines has its strengths; Google is best for getting quick up to date relevant results, and Yahoo is good narrowing search results categories before a search begins, and hotbot excels in advanced time-sensitive searches (www.pcworld.com). Keeping these strengths in mind, I set out to make my own personal evaluation of the sites.

Brief Guidelines-
· What information are you looking for?
o Find the official site for the Nokia 8260 cell phone and find a site offering the purchase of an 8260 over the Internet.
· Do you already know a great deal about the subject or do you need to find out lots of details?
o Already know a good deal
· What is your query? (This is not the same answer as the first question.)
o How can I purchase a Nokia 8260 on-line and what is the official Nokia homepage URL?
· What search terms will you use?
o Nokia 8260
· Which search engines did you choose and why?
o Google, Yahoo, Hotbot because these are three of three of the most widely used search engines.
· Is there a particular feature that would help your search?
o No
· Of the three search engines used, which gave you the most satisfactory result? Why?
o Yahoo because I personally found these results, while not a plentiful as Googles, to be much easier to sort through because of their organization into categories, much more relevant, and in general very successful in finding the official Nokia site, and helpful to me as a consumer looking to buy an 8260.
· Which features of the search engines did you use?
o Standard
· Compare the features of your chosen engines and describe any difficulties you had with your search.
o See detailed description of each search engine above.
· Did you find the information you were looking for?
o Yes
· If you had problems, what did you do to try and overcome these difficulties?