Thursday, January 7, 2010

Meta Search Engines and Subject Directories

M e t a- Search Engine

Dogpile has two additional tabs – Yellow Pages and White Pages. Yellow Pages searches for businesses specifically, while White Pages enables one to search for a particular person. However, both tabs do not serve this Research Topic any purpose.




Dog pile searches through four search engines, Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com. However, most of the searches come Google and Yahoo. 8 out of the first 10 searches were deemed useful and the site took approximately 2.03 seconds to retrieve the date requested.

Dogpile states the search engine that the webpage was found at. This would be useful to see where to continue the search perhaps. For example, if one finds that Yahoo stores extensive information on Online Gaming, one can decide to switch to use Yahoo instead.


Subject Directories


Yahoo Directories took approximately 1.93 seconds to retrieve the selected data, and offers very different information from the other sites. Only 2 out of the 10 sites were valuable information. It would take even longer to sift through the directories one by one discover extensive findings. However, one cannot rule out the criticalness of this information.



Yahoo Directories provides related directory categories for one to look into to seek human-classified information. However in this case, most of the directories include pages about online games instead of its effects on adolescents.


This is a table compiling all the different search tools I have been using in these past few weeks.


Comparisons of Search Engine

Search Tool

No of. Results

Time Taken

No of relevant entries in Top 10 Searches

Special features

Google

34,100,000

0.75s

(0.12s as stated)

8

Similar

Cache

Yahoo

6,500,000

1.42s

3

Cache

Meta Search Engine – Dogpile

Does not state

2.03s

8

Search Engine Information is found on

Subject Directories

203

1.93s

(0.23s as stated)

2

Related Directory Categories


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