Audience of the articles
The articles that I used to research this topic were primarily from the
company information of the search engines that I was researching.
Audience of this review
This review is directed towards anyone who would like to learn more
about basic functionalities of popular search engines. The similarities
and differences between Google, Altavista, and Lycos are generally
discussed for informational purposes.
Investigation
Debuting in 1999, Google is a
one of the largest and most efficient search
engines. Google is among the most innovative of all the search engines in
terms of searches for relevancy. Much of its popularity comes from the
fact that displays only the most pertinent links for a given topic by
using link analysis. A unique feature that Google has over other search
engines is that it has a special cache feature that allows you to access a
site from cache if that site is either down or no longer available.
Debuting in 1995, AltaVista is one of the oldest and reputable search engines. Much of its popularity comes from the fact that it boosts a very large full-text database. AltaVista was the first search engine to store every word of every page on the entire Internet in a fast, searchable index. It also was the first search engine to support multi-language searches and the ability to translate sites from one language to another.
Debuting in 1997, Lycos has one of the greatest global impacts of the search engines. Its merger with Terra Networks in 2000 has made it one of the worlds leading search engines. Lycos searches several other major databases when it provides a search result. For this reason, Lycos is an extensive search engine capable to finding a vast array of information.
While comparing these three search engines, many similarities and differences can be observed. The first notable comparison is the method in which each of these search engines carries out searches. Google uses an automatic AND Boolean search and an optional OR Boolean search. It does not yet support the AND operator, NOT operator, or full Boolean searching with the ability to nest operators. It was also the first to introduce - a NOT search option. Google has stop words, but has the ability to search with stop words if needed. AltaVista uses a default OR Boolean search option and has the options +, -, AND, OR, AND NOT, and (). AltaVista can use full Boolean searching as well as nested searches using parentheses. AltaVista does not have any stop words. Lycos allows only the use of a + for AND and - for NOT, but no Boolean operators. Lycos does not have any stop words.
Other similarities between Google, AltaVista, and Lycos include proximity searching, case sensitivity, fields searching, and sorting. Proximity searching refers to how close words should be when searching phrases. All of these search engines use phrase matching, which looks for phrases in the exact order that they are entered in the search. Case sensitivity refers to the ability of the search engine to search all cases in both topic entry and search results. All of these search engines are case insensitive. Fields searching is the ability to define from where a search comes from instead of searching the entire Internet. All of these search engines allow for field searching. Sorting is the ability to organize the results of the search. All of these entire search engines sort by relevance to the search topic.
Differences between these search engines include truncation and their limitations. Truncation refers to the ability of the search engine to search for just a portion of a word by using an asterisk to signify the rest of the word. Both Google and Lycos do not permit truncation searches, however, AltaVista does. Limitations between these search engines differ greatly as well. Google has language, domain, date, filetype, and adult content limits. AltaVista has language limits and the option of date limits. Lycos does not have any limits in its normal search.
Comparative Test
For my search, I chose to look for information on "Transformers"--as
in the popular 80's cartoon series and toys with whom I grew up
watching avidly. Upon doing a random search on "Transformers" I was given
488,000
search results from Google, 349,112 search results from AltaVista, and
248,749 search results from Lycos. Search terms of "Transformers
toys," "Transformers cartoon," "Transformers Fan Site," "Transformers
Autobots," and "Transformers Decepticons" provided more concise search
results. Google was good because there were no
annoying advertisements on the search engine, whereas both AltaVista and
Lycos had ads scattered in their pages. The search results for what I was
looking for were best found by Google and Lycos because they referenced me
to pages containing Transformers the cartoon/toy. AltaVista provided a
helpful search suggestion link to help narrow my topic down to something
closer to my topic. Thus, for this example Google had the most search
results and the most relevant sites. This generalization carried over to
several other searches that I made. In all those other trials, Google
provided the most matches and the most relevant sites.
Conclusion
In the end, however, search engines are all useful to navigating the
Internet. As to which search engine to use, I believe that it is up to
the user to decide which one they like best. I tend to find successes
using Google, however, someone else may find that another search engine
provides them with what they are looking for. Thus, it is the
responsibility of the user to research and try different search engines
and methods while trying to find information on the Internet. As the
Internet continues to grow, search engines will have to adapt and
continually update their databases or become outdated. As such, todays
search engines could be replaced in the future with better, more efficient
ones in the near future.
|
Search
Engine
|
Boolean
|
Proximity
|
Truncation
|
Case
|
Fields
|
Limitations
|
Stop
|
Sorting
|
| Google Search Engine |
-, OR |
Phrase |
No |
No |
Yes |
Language, Domain, Filetype, Date,
Adult
Content |
|
Relevance |
| AltaVista Search Engine |
+, -, AND, OR, AND NOT, (
) |
Phrase
|
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Language, Date |
No |
Relevance |
| Lycos Search Engine |
+, - |
Phrase |
No |
No |
Yes |
No |
No |
Relevance |
Danny Nguyen
March 20, 2002