Search Engine Comparison
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| Name of Search Engine | Alltheweb | |
| What is the URL? | http://www.alltheweb.com | http://www.google.com |
| What is it used for? | Alltheweb combines one of the largest indices with powerful search features that allow the user to find info faster than with any other search engine. | Google's mission is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. In addition to providing access to web pages they have many special features, such as, Calculator (to evaluate mathematical expressions), Local Search (local businesses and services), Search by number (to access package tracking info, US Patents, and a variety of online databases), Street Maps (US), and Travel Information (to check the status of an airline flight in the US or view airport delays and weather conditions), to name a few. |
| How easy or difficult is it to figure out how to search? | Easy to figure out. The home page is uncluttered and very basic. The search box is the dominate feature on the home page. | Easy to figure out. The home page is uncluttered. Enter descriptive terms and hit enter. |
| How do you navigate through it? | First, pick the feature, ex. Web, News, Pictures, Video or Audio and then type your search words. Next, click on the links of interest. | Easy! Pick the feature, ex. Web, Image etc., enter the search terms and click on the links of interest. |
| How many Web sites are covered? | Alltheweb's index (provided by yahoo) includes billions of web pages, as well as tens of millions of PDF and MS Word files. Their image, audio, and video searches include hundreds of millions of multimedia files. | Access to more than 4 billion web pages. |
| What are some searching tips? | A basic search is done by filling in a search query in the search box and pressing the "SEARCH" button. You may want to search for a whole word pattern, for example when you are searching for a person or a movie title. You can tell AlltheWeb to match your phrase exactly by enclosing your query in quotation marks | To enter a query into Google, just type in a few descriptive words and hit the 'enter' key (or click on the Google Search button) for a list of relevant web pages. Since Google only returns web pages that contain all the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. Your new query will return a smaller subset of the pages Google found for your original "too-broad" query. Google Is not case sensitive. Use quotes for a phrase. |
| Can you change the default search logic? | Yes. Advanced offers "all of the word," "any of the words," "the exact phrase," and Boolean searches, also includes a Query language guide, and the following to include and exclude additional criteria: Language, Word Filters, Domain Filters, File Formats, and Date. | Yes. "+," "-," "~," "phrase," "or," and language, date, occurrence, and domain. |
| Can you change the way in which results are displayed? | The presentation of results can be changed as to how many to display per page. | The presentation of results can be changed as to how many to display per page. |
| How many results did you receive? | The search term Enlarged Thyroid Gland produced 27,176 hits. | The same search term, Enlarged Thyroid Gland produced 42,100 hits. |
| How current are the results? | I can't find the answer to this... | Updated approximately once a month |
| What proportion of the results were relevant? | AlltheWeb Search results page into sections, so that it's clear and easy to find what you want. They show the types of results that are relevant to the search, there are two types: Sponsor results and Web results. In the thyroid search, the web results were relevant, the sponsor results were not. There 10 web results to 1 sponsor result. | All displayed in relevance. Sponsor links were off to the side which, in my opinion is a good place for them. |
| Was the amount of detail displayed with the results adequate? | Yes. A brief description, more hits from, and the URL. | Yes. A brief description, cached pages, similar pages and the URL. |
| Was the order in which the results were displayed evident and/or logical? | It appeared that the top results were the most logical. | It appeared that the top results were the most logical. |
| What are the strengths/weaknesses? | Strength: fast; Weakness: kind of vague information. | Fast. Sponsor links to the side. No pop ups. |
| How often is it updated? | Yahoo frequently scans the entire web to ensure Alltheweb's content is fresh and to eliminate broken links. The News search feature offers up to the minute news from thousands of new sources across the globe, with hundreds of stories indexed every minute. | The database of WebPages and the index are updated once a month. |
| What is the e-mail address to submit questions? | Although, there were several email forms to submit to the company I could not find an email address. | Long list of email addresses for different needs, for ex. suggestions: suggestions@google.com, jobs: jobs@google.com. Very detailed and informative, impressive contact list. |
| On a scale of 1 to 10 (1=poor, 10=superior), rate each search engine. | 8.5 | 10 |
| Briefly describe why you rated each as you did. | Fast, accurate, pretty easy to use, really good! | Very fast, precise, easy to use, awesome! |