This paper is review of three popular search engines and will compare their features, benefits, and overall ease of use. This review will serve to help those who want to learn more about certain topics choose the search engine that is best suited for them. After going over how each of the search engines goes about their searches, I will list the features and benefits of each. Finally, I will test the effectiveness of the engines by inputting a query and seeing what each search engine returns. I will tabulate these results in a table at the end of the review to help easily compare the differences between the search engines.
I decided to focus on those search engines I have frequently used in the past as well as the one I use most today. I decided to compare Altavista, Excite, and Google. As my search topic, I decided to look for information about a car I am interested in purchasing post-graduation: the Subaru Impreza WRX. While I know simple specs about the car such as price and horsepower, I'm especially interested in finding out people's opinions about the car through reviews and reliability reports.
Google relies on its special PageRankTM software, developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin - the Google founders, to provide returns to user inputted queries. The software ranks web pages from across the Internet in terms of the number of links that go to a specific web page. The more links that link to a certain web page about the user query, the higher the ranking. Every "link" is not equal however, if the page with the link is not that important, its link is not weighted that heavily into the ranking as a page that is considered important. This is where the PageRankTM software comes in, determining what is important and not important through its complex algorithms. It doesn't stop there though, the software also makes sure that the pages that have high rankings are relevant to the query you are searching.
What appears to users on-screen hides the complexity of the software behind it. All a user has to do is type a query into a simple form on the screen and search. If you want more options to customize your search, Google has that as well. Their advanced preferences allow you to find exact phrases, combinations of words, and limit your search to web pages by format, date, language, etc.
I decided to use a query that would give me results pertaining to the Subaru WRX's reliability. I typed in "Subaru wrx reliability" into the search field of each search engine and saw what each returned. I looked at the top 3 links each returned and saw which ones I thought were the most helpful.
Using Google, I got back 1830 results. Out of the top 3 links, two were very helpful. They linked me to car reviews that talked about the WRX's reliability. The other link was simply a car parts site that was about parts for the WRX, not very helpful. Altavista returned a roughly 389 results although out of the top 3 links, none were very helpful. The results included a car dealership, a personal website, and a parts company. I decided to use Altavista's Prisma option to help refine my search. To my surprise, the search tool only added to the confusion, giving me sites that were all about car parts. The Lycos search engine returned similar results. While it returned the most results, 2023, none were relevant to the information I was looking for. The sites included 3 Subaru part websites and no car reviews or reliability tests.
I decided to try to look for specific car reviews and typed in "Subaru wrx review" into the search field. Google's top 3 links were all to different reviews about the Subaru WRX. Some were different than my initial search and were very helpful in finding information about the car. Altavista, while in the top 10 search results had some car reviews, had more car enthusiast and car part sites in the top 3 links. Lycos did give me several of the same reviews as Google did, and within the top 3 links, were all car reviews. The reviews were all from the same site, however and thus not as good as the varied reviews I received from Google.
I finally decided to broaden my search terms to simply Subaru WRX and see what the search engines returned. Google and Lycos both returned the official Subaru website which gave me great information about the car even though it comes biased from the manufacturer. Altavista still didn't give me relevant information in the top 3 links it returned.
Even when I used the advanced features in Altavista and Lycos, the results I got were no better than before. Overall, Google was the best search engine out of all that I compared. Its simplicity makes it even easier to use with no "in your face" ads and sponsors on the website giving extraneous information that is of no use. For basic search purposes, Google returned the most relevant results and provided the most useful and varied information of all the search engines. I've included a table below to show the number of hits for each of the different searches I performed, and while hits are important, my searches have proven that they are by no means always correlated with useful information.
| The Query | 
| 
| 
|
|---|---|---|---|
| subaru wrx reliability | 1,830 results | 389 results | 2,046 results |
| subaru wrx review | 9,940 results | 1,162 results | 23,332 results |
| subaru wrx | 65,700 results | 15,597 results | 168,770 results |
| Subaru WRX Search Results | |||