Clusty (http://clusty.com)

• I did the same search, for knitting lace edging and directions, and I got about 6,800 results.
• I recognized all of the results from previous searches.
• I tried beginner's lace knitting patterns one more time.
• I got about 16,800 results, but those in the first few results pages were not what I was looking for. They seemed to be a lot like the pages I'd looked at before.

Comparison of Search Experiences
I tried to keep my search terms relatively consistent so that I could really compare the results I got from different search engines. The one exception was Ask Jeeves, because I tried to use the question format. I noticed that the search interfaces were really similar, with a single box and a clearly marked search button. My favorite of the five was MSN Search, because the search interface was very simple, and also nice to look at. The Yahoo! page was a little cluttered for me. I would have preferred a simpler search page, maybe something separate from the main Yahoo! page.

In terms of results pages, I found Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search to be very similar. I hated the Ask Jeeves search results page because there were way too many "sponsored web results" at the top and bottom of the results list. At least with Google, the sponsored results are in a completely different section of the page. With Yahoo! and MSN Search, no sponsored results showed up at all. I liked the results page on Clusty because it clustered my results by categories in a sidebar. I was able to weed out a lot of irrelevant information that way.

In terms of actual results, I found Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, and Clusty to be pretty similar. Ask Jeeves gave me too many completely irrelevant results for me to find it useful. Overall, Google was the best search engine for my information need, as it provided the highest number of relevant results in the first few pages. The rest of the search engines included a higher percentage of results that led me to pay-per-pattern sites or to books on Amazon. I noticed that changing my search strategy by putting quotes around the phrases I wanted to search didn't really improve my results. In fact, in both Google and Yahoo!, it seemed to decrease the number of useful results, perhaps because a search for the whole phrase "knitting lace edging" is much narrower than a search for the three separate words as keywords. In MSN Search, I decided to try a different search term that I thought might bring up better results (beginner's lace knitting patterns), but I ended up getting no hits. It seems that, at least for my information need, the best strategy is to use simple searches with major keywords that will help identify relevant results.

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