Week 8 - Search Engines

The last session of the Joneses! I confess I have been putting off this entry, I'm not keen on searchenginewatch. It's a very 'busy' site, and I had to look for a while before I found the 'Ratings and Stats' section where the search engines were directly measured up against each other I think it's great to have sites that are dedicated to the search engines themselves and that can monitor them, but I personally don't find these sites that useful. As for the search engines themselves:
1. I always use Google, I know it's the most popular, and I think that's because of the simple layout. If I am looking for something very specific and have already tried an advanced search, boolean terms and so forth, I would be inclined to look at a specific database that related to my topic, eg the Health and Wellness database that is accessible through Logan Libraries' catalogue.
2. Bananaslug! how could you not like something called bananaslug. An interesting alternative way of searching, and also one that could turn up interesting results. Probably a good idea to use this if you are starting a project as you can combine your search terms with a random word from one of the categories. I tried 'Jane Austen' and clicked on 'Themes from Shakespeare'(random theme was charity) which was probably a good combination.
3. I know people who like Ask.com (they liked it better when it was Ask Jeeves!), it is good that it offers you different combinations of search terms, and questions that you might be asking.Nice and simple, yes please!
4. Yahoo doesn't appeal to me, I don't like the ads or the layout, but I think my likes and dislikes in a search engine reflect what I search for (ie research and scholarly stuff!) rather than recreation.
5. I like Dogpile's layout, it is very easy on the eye. It is a metasearch engine which means it combines the search results of the others like yahoo & google. I also like the white and yellow pages search facility-BUT it is AMERICAN so no good for me. No Australian version unfortunately.
6. There is a sound idea behind Wink, but again it is very American and I think the data it retrieves is too limited.
Well, I have learned a lot through the Joneses, but the best thing I learned is that there is so much more to learn!!! Web 2.0 is growing and changing and developing all the time!