Differences between search engines
Google and Yahoo are somewhat similar with a simple list but Google presents news information first.
Ask Jeeves starts off with a list of commercial sites, all wanting to do business with you and only lower down shows you 'real' results. But in its favour, there is a list of related searches down the right hand side.
Clusty is at first similar with a list of results and a few advertisements but there is a very useful feature in that down the left hand side, it clusters the results in categories which it has discerned.
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Try Clusty out with the search term organ and you will see the value of the category feature. Because organ is ambiguous as a search term, Clusty very neatly categorises its results into organ as a musical instrument and parts of the body. You can see that in this way Clusty can lead you to a set of results more focused that the other three search engines. |
Of course none of these search engines is perfect and it would unwise to rank one above another.
Now let's have a look at how search engines deal with Compound queries ...
