"Austin, TX is my first choice for location" I tell the interviewers at the end of every interview. This summer, I researched different cities and parts of the country to find a location that will suite me next year when I graduate. I have heard wonderful things about Austin such as its a beautiful city, fun, and great place for young adults. However, I have never been to Austin. I could not tell you the first thing about the city. I would like to learn more about the location, climate, landscape, housing, cost of living, and entertainment of Austin, Texas. Therefore, I am going to research the city of Austin on three different search engines which will allow me to learn more about the city while making an analysis of the different search engines.
I most commonly search for information on either Google or Yahoo! Although I find each site to be user friendly and effective in retrieving information, I would like to take this opportunity to search on sites I have never used before. This is why I have choosen to search topics related to Austin on Excite, Hotbot, and Altavista. My objective for this will be to broaden my knowledge on the features and results of many search engines.
For most of the common search engines, the intended audience is the typical user who does not need to have alot of background information on the search engine. In order to take advantage of the special features, people have to have a deeper understanding of the use of the search engines.
My query is "Why to live in Austin, Texas". I wanted to keep a basic query because I am looking for a wide range of information related to Austin. The search term I will use is "Austin, Texas". I do not want to conduct a Boolean search because I dont want to limit my information that I can find about the city. The same search term is used for each search engine so that I may have a standard way to compare which search engine is best in my opinion.
Because I am basing my search from a broad queary, several features found on most search engines may help focus my results. The three features I have found helpful are Related Searches, Clustering, and Search Within.A related searches feature is designed to help users narrow in on what they are looking for. For example, let's say I searched for "mars." When the results appeared, I might also be shown some related searches links, such as "mission to mars" or "life on mars." If one of these links are selected, then a new search would be conducted, using the words clicked on. Clustering prevents the problem of finding all the top results coming from one site.Clustering generally allows only one or two pages per site to be represented in the top results. This means that I can get more variety and a better chance of quickly finding something of interest. The broad search term "Austin, Texas" will more than likely produce too many results. Instead of trying a new search, I can ave more luck narrowing down the set of matches I've already generated by using the Search Within feature. (www.searchenginewatch.com) These features can help me be more specific in my query, leading to better results on living in Austin, Texas.
At first look, the home page for Excite is very busy and distracting.
The home page includes many useful links indcluding a current stock exchange
prices and horoscopes, however these features are not important to me when
I am focusing on a particular research. With my standard "Austin, Texas"
search terms, the site quickly returned 89 results, many of which had relevant
information such as, "Why you should Live and Work in Austin" "Live
and Work in Austin" "Relocate to Austin" and "Austin Texas
Real Estate" The the title of the results are accompanied with an explanation
of its content. I then used the Related Search feature which provided me with
a listing of 8 narrowed searches which provided differing results. There is
no way to disable the Clustering Feature at Excite. However, you can see more
pages from any particular site listed by selecting the "more from this
site" link that
follows the listing.
When HotBot debuted in May 1996, it gained a strong following
among serious searchers for the quality and comprehensiveness of its crawler-based
results,
which were provided by Inktomi, at the time. It also caught the attention
of experienced web users and techies, especially for the unusual colors and
interface it continues to sport today.
Hot Bot offers an organized and well displayed home page. Although
the page includes many different links similare to what is offered on Excite,
the page is better visually displayed. A drawback to this website is the pop
up advertisements that appeared on my screen. Hot Bot is powered by Direct
Hit, Inktomi and Dmoz. Also, it seems to be sponsored by or contracted with
Lycos. My basic search provided me with several matches broken up by category:
Sponsored Search Listings, Search Partners, Network, Web Results(looks like
what most search engines return) and Related Categories (created narrowed
search topics). The web results produced 2,370,600 matches and the retlated
categories produced 130. The Related Search feature is used Under the heading
of Related Categories. The categories given prove to be helpful in my search.
With HotBot, clustering is on by default. However, it only works within the
listings provided by Inktomi. To turn off clustering, go to the advanced search
page, then in the "Best Page Only" section, check the "Disable
Best Page Only Filter" box. You can also view more pages from any particular
site listed by selecting the "See results from this site only" link
that follows the listing. (searchenginewatch.com)
AltaVista is the oldest crawler-based search engine on the
web. It opened in December 1995 and for several years was the "Google"
of its day, in terms of
providing relevant results and having a loyal group of users that loved the
service.Improvements have been made, but crawlers such as Google and AllTheWeb.com
still provide more comprehensive results. Because of this, AltaVista is probably
a third-choice crawler, one to try if you haven't found what you are looking
for at one of its
competitors. AltaVista does remains strong is in terms of some of the specialty
searching it offers. It provides a good image search service, and you can
look for video and audio clips, as well. It also has an outstanding news search
service.
The well organized and orderly Altavista homepage is inviting and a break from the overwhelming Excite search engine. As with the previously mentioned search engines, Altavista provides links to many useful sites. 1,100,721 web results were returned, although I found many irrelevant sites. Therefore, I took advantage of the Related Searches feature called Altavista Prisma which helps to refina a search. AltaVista clusters listings so that no more than two pages per site appear in its results. If a second page from a particular web site is listed, it will be indented under the first page. To see more results from a site, select the "Additional relevant pages from this site" link, if it appears for a particular listing. You can also take advantage of another feature with Altavista. After performing a search, check the "Search within these results" box under the search box, on the results page.(searchenginewatch.com)
| Evaluation Measures |  |
 |
 |
| # of Results | 89 | 2,370,600 | 1,100,721 |
| Appearance | Cluttered, overwhelming, pop up advertisements, not organized | Alot of color, well organized, useful links, pop up advertisemetns | Orderly, organized, simple color scheme, some useful links |
| User Friendly | Overwhelming, too busy, not as many options and features. | User friendly. Results well organized for ease of search. |
Very user friendly. Not overwhelming. Best use of extra features. |
| Relevant Infromation | Small amount of results, but relevant information. | Categories group together produce many focused matches. | Many irrelevant sites. However, special features help to narrow and focus search to produce relevant information. |
Each search engine provided me with everything I was looking for and more. I have searched for apartments in Austin, learned about entertainment, studied maps to find out about different parts of the town and research business opportunities within the city. After looking a pictures and reading up on more information, I have decided that I would love to live in Austin, Texas next year!
Each engine provided many of the same results and webpages. However, my favorite site of the three is Altavista. I say this because this site is the most user friendly, offers the use of the most special features and helped me focus my search easier and faster. On the other sites, I researched special features that should have been able to be taken advantage of, but was not able to figure out how to use them. This problem, however, is the only challenged I faced when navigating through the search engines.
Becoming familiar with Excite, Hotbot and Altavista proves to be beneficial to me in that I am able to tap into more resources when doing research. However, I foresee myself continuing to use Google and Yahoo! I find Google and Yahoo! to be the best search engines for me in that they provide numerous relevant searches quickly and are the most user friendly for me.
www.unc.edu/~kingraha/inls80.html