Week 9 - Google and beyond

Well as I'm on a desperate hunt to organise a family holiday I've used our assignment to see whether different search engines provide any new results - the answer is no. Now this may be because a holiday is fairly generic - there are a limited number of companies that offer self-catering accommodation. However, AskJeeves did have some interesting asides in its 'Popular Q&A' section, which although not strictly helpful to my search did provide some pause for thought.

After using metacrawler I felt that the search results returned were actually less relevant and for my holiday search had actually listed irrelevant items and more 'sponsered' links.

Now to see how famous I am!!! After searching for my name I discovered that Metacrawler and Dogpile returned very similiar results - 192.com, facebook, linkedin etc. However, Zuula returned more results that were less relevant - i.e. had the words Helen and Precious but not linked as a name, which would clearly returned a wider breadth of 'or' results. Google for ease and comfort would probably still be my favourite - just familiarity!

Love the Let me google that link - although not sure how great it would be from a customer service stand point!

Igoogle/google reader

That's section 2 completed - isn't it hard to think of websites that your regularly use that aren't just for shopping!

I can imagine that as a student that these functionailites are very useful but I'm not sure how relevant they would be day to day - surely it's just quicker to search a website directly to see what's new? maybe I'm missing the point?