Sunday, December 11, 2011

Thing 19: Search Engines

Here I will search a common topic on several different kinds of search engines and discuss my results. My topic will be "Blacksmithing" (remember?). I'll describe the top 5 results from each search.

I searched "Blacksmithing" in Bing and got the following results:
1.) The Wikipedia article for "Blacksmith"
2.) A blacksmithing guide for the computer game World of Warcraft.
3 - 5.) And three informative websites about the art of blacksmithing.

Next I did the same search in Google:
The results were very similar to Bing. There was the same Wikipedia article, and then four websites about the game World of Warcraft.

I then searched Dogpile.com (a meta search engine):
Here the results seemed to be quite literally a mix of Bing and Google. The Wikipedia article was on top, and below that was a mix of websites about World of Warcraft and about the art of blacksmithing.

Overall, I'm not a big fan of metasearching (or federated searching) because often you have to sacrifice specificity for quantity of results. A single search engine's results of 7,530,000 is quite enough for me, thank you.

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