Search Engines
A search engine is a website that allows you to input words representing your search terms and uses these to come up with a list of websites which should be relevant to your search. Repeating the same search using different search engines may lead to different results due to the way in which the various search engines search the web and order the sites found. You should have experience of a selection of search engines to understand their similarities and differences. It can be illustrative to make identical searches on a number of search engines and observe the different results.
There are many different search engine sites. It is important to have a grasp of a few of the most important sites, ie: those that lead quickly to useful information. This can be because they specialise in a particular sector are well funded and thus comprehensive. (Such sites are popular and so command large fees for their advertising services.)
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Start by familiarising yourself with some of the popular search engines which will be important in your information searching. Go to each search engine listed below and try out the search term british planes. Do not bother to use capital letters in the search terms as the search engines do not really take them into account. Google at http://www.google.co.uk Yahoo at http://uk.yahoo.com/ Clusty at http://clusty.com/ Ask Jeeves at http://www.ask.co.uk/ Note down what you find in the layout and types of information displayed. |
You will find four rather different results. Even if the same results were displayed (which is unlikely given the slightly vague search term), each search engine presents the information in a different manner.
Let's find out more about the differences between search engines...
