More on Thing 12 - Comparing search engines

I tried out the tools for comparing search engines side-by-side. I like the google/yahoo graphical comparison the best. Some of google's top returns (but yahoo's low returns) were the strictly informative sites on the history of bolero, which is what I would be the most interested in. Jux2.com seemed less helpful, as everything was only compared to msn.com.

Metasearch engines:
1 - Dogpile's hits were more commercial.
2 - Clusty was slow, but I liked the detailed description of each site.

Visual Search Engines
1 - Their mascot is a little creepy, but I liked the visual format of kartOOif one is brainstorming around a topic and trying to figure out where they want to go. It can, however, pick up a lot of irrelevant sub-search criterion. For example, I was looking at the results from "Bolero Dance" and ended up following this thread: Bolero Dance - Studies - Mathematics - Departments - Webmaster. I seems the webmaster for one dance site works in the math dept at a university. So that thread was obviously irrelevant.

2- I couldn't find Qunitura at first b/c it is actually spelled Quintura. It is a nice combo of visual and list format.

3 - OK - now musicplasma.com was way more cool than I expected. For a certified movie-junkie, its just heaven. It contains a visual map of movies by topic or director or actor. Ist is like 6 degrees of separation or 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon...whichever you prefer.

Thing 12 - Other Search Engines - What's Bolero?

In order to compare different search engines, I looked for information on one of my favorite dances, the Bolero. I entered "Bolero Dance" in the search bar.

Google - More informational sites came up in the top 10. The sponsored sites were off to the side so it is easy to ignore them.

Ask.com - More commercial sites popped up in the top 10. However, I like the sidebar with suggestions on narrowing or broadening one's search. I also just noticed that the main sites were sandwiched between the sponsored sites. There is so much to wade through as it is that I don't want anything unnecessary returned.

Yahoo - More informational sites came up and it gave suggestions for further searching.

MSN - I don't know if my server suddenly screeched to a halt, but MSN was extremely slow. It finally returned results similar to google.

I did another search on "celtic cross" images. Google and ask.com were fast and returned similar results. Yahoo was fast, returned color images at the top of the list, but also returned inappropriate images. MSN was fast this time (OK, so maybe it was my server), primarily color pics, but no inappropriate images.

The loveliness of technology

I was gone all last week for a workshop. A sub and student teacher covered my classes. I wrote my presentations on PowerPoint before I left and then left my laptop with my student teacher. He was able to pick up right where I left off in the class notes. I felt so much more confident that my students were not missing anything while I was gone.