POST 3: Search Engines

Hi friends... :)

Do you realize that there are a lot of search engine in the web? There’s a lot such as Dogpile, mamma.com, Eric digests, Netscape search, MSN, Excite, AOL search, and AltaVista. But, before we proceed with them, it is crucial to know what search engine is all about. According to Shelly Vermaat (2009), search engine can be defined as ‘a program that finds web sites, web pages, images, videos, news, and other information related to a specific topic.’

When thinking about search engines, I probably just thought of yahoo.com and google.com as the famous search engine. However, when I’m being asked by the lecturer to write about other search engine which are yahoo.com., Google scholar, Eric digests, and mamma.com., something come across to my mind. What am I going to write? Then, I start searching information through web to look at the similarities and differences between them. And of course to gain some experience using them. Actually, I’ve been exposed to those search engines since I was doing my diploma. But, it was a long time ago. Below are the similarities and differences between four of them.

The similarity between Eric digests, yahoo.com, mamma.com. and Google scholar is that they are search engines which enable users to find related articles on the topics they are looking for. However, there are certain elements which make them vary.

A part from that, we can see that there are certain elements which make them vary. Firstly, to compare in terms of features, Yahoo.com and Mamma.com provide tabs for web, images, video, local, shopping, jobs, travel, yellow pages and white pages. This is to make the search engines is kind of user friendly. While Eric Digests and Google Scholar does not contain any. Besides, in Eric Digests, it provides solely short reports on topics of prime current interest in educational sector while in Google Scholar, the features of this search engine are Search (diverse sources from one convenient place), Find (papers, abstracts and citations), Locate (the complete paper through library or on the web ), and Learn (key papers in any area of research).

The next characteristic is the number of search finding. We can see a clear difference in this characteristic when I try to search articles related to tpic stress, the results are 787,000,000 found in Yahoo.com, 3,920,000 found in Google Scholar, 375 articles found in Eric Digests and the east is in Mamma.com which is only 61 articles. Then, I could say that Yahoo.com and Google Scholar are able to endow with a variety of information on the topic you want to know.

By looking at their target user, Yahoo.com and Mamma.com do not restrict their market into certain group of people, their service is for everyone who wants to find information on the topic they feel interesting. Unlike the two of them, Google Scholar and Eric Digests is made especailly for those who are interesting in findings articles related to educational sector only. For example, in Google Scholar, user can search for peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. While in Eric Digests, it is suitable for teachers, administrators, policymakers, and other practitioners, but generally useful to the broad educational community.

The last characteristic that I'm going to look at is the tagline. Both Yahoo.com and Eric Digests do not have any tagline while Mamma.com and Google Scholar come out with tagline. As for Mamma.com, its tagline is “The Mother of All Search Engines” and for Google Scholar is “Stand on the shoulders of giants”.

After I tried all these search engines, I found that the most effective among the four of them are yahoo.com and Google Scholar. They provide a variety of information and the search findings also not limited. Like the table above, when I’m searching information on topic stress, they were able to list down thousands and millions of related articles, but the other two search engines solely provide a very small number.

To recapitulate, it is depends on the users themselves to choose the most suitable search engines that suit them. But, as for me, I would prefer yahoo.com and Google Scholar as the best search engines because they are able to provide a wide range of information that I looking for in order to do research on my assignments.