Search Engines: Better Ways to Find Meaningful Results
Alan Cohen
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Introduction
Search engines are extremely popular. We all use them. We google the Internet
However, searching is more than googling. Enter any word or topic and a search engine returns thousands of results.
How useful is this? Do you quickly find the information you want? Do you get quality information?
If your work relies on research then this can be a problem. You don't want to sieve through thousands of Web sites. You want a more efficient way to narrow your search to find meaningful results.
There is a new bread of search engine that tries to alleviate this problem. They return results by category.
Enter Christmas into Google. I received 134,000,000 results. That is a lot of results to sift through!
PreviewSeek.com
Enter Christmas into PreviewSeek.com. This search engine returned 312,000,000 results. That is a daunting amount of sites to sift through!
However, PreviewSeek (www.previewseek.com) does an excellent job categorizing search results. This engine categorized the Christmas results into the following categories: Holidays, Around, Cards, Story, Santa Claus, Gifts, Ideas, Lights, Crafts, Tree, Christian, Celebrations, Kids Domain, and Encyclopedia. The Show More link displays more categories.
Categories are useful. They refine your search and display categories that you may not have thought related to your query.
Clusty.com
Enter Christmas into Clusty.com. I received 61,680,010 results.
Clusty organized these results into clusters. Clusters are categorized into three groups: topics, sources, and URLs.
The initial set of clusters by topic are: Cards, Christmas Tree, Christmas Recipes, Kids, Christmas Carols, Christmas Stories, Lights, Ornaments, Merry Christmas, and Clip Art.
Clusty even returned some clusters under the heading Shopping. These clusters are: Holiday Ornaments & Décor, Collectables, Dinnerware & Serveware, Children's DVDs & Videos, and Costumes & Accessories.