Search Engines

The eight search engines I found were WolframAlpha, Bing, DuckDuckGo, DogPile, Yahoo! Search, Ask, Webcrawler and MyWebSearch. I’ve visited each search engine and concluded the following:

WolframAlpha: This search engine seems to be for math inquires. I started to type in “cars” thinking it was just a normal search engine but the first suggestions it gave me when I typed in “car” was “carbon” “carbon steel” and “carbon dioxide” so off the bat I could tell it wasn’t your average search engine. In the frequently asked questions page about this search engine they describe themselves as “[A] computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.”

Bing: This search engine is a lot like Google. You type in a phrase or a word and it searches it for you. I do not like this search engine. The home page brought up a giant picture of a buffalo and it is not very aesthetically pleasing. It gives news stories at the bottom which I guess could be useful, but if I’m going to Bing specifically to search for something, I wouldn’t be interested in reading news stories at that moment.

DuckDuckGo: This search engine has the slogan of “The search engine that doesn’t track you”. I’m not sure what that would be useful for unless you were being sneaky about something but I guess that could be useful for some people. I personally would not use this search engine.

DogPile: This is another one very similar to Google. You type in what you want searched and it searches the web for that content. I like the theme of this search engine. It has a little dog on the bottom of the page with a ball in his mouth and when you search for something you click on the button that says “Go Fetch!”. It’s a neat theme and I wouldn’t mind using this search engine.

Yahoo! Search: I like this search engine a lot. It also has a standard Google-type set up. However there are a couple things that set this one apart. It has news stories on the page, trending topics, and my favorite: the local weather.  It’s nice that it includes weather because turning on the TV and waiting for the local weather forecast could take a while. It also gives a 3 day forecast as well which is really nice.

Ask: This is a cool search engine. It has little trivia questions on the homepage which is really neat. For example, the question of the day was “Which taste can a cat not experience?” and I learned that cats can’t taste things that are sweet unlike most mammals. Without visiting this webpage today I would have never known that.

Webcrawler: This search engine says it combines results from Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search, and Ask. This would give you a wide variety of websites to choose from. I would use this search engine if I were having a hard time finding what I was looking for.

MyWebSearch: I do not like this search engine. It’s layout is basic and boring and it says “powered by Google” so you may as well just use Google. The only good thing about this search engine is that it has quic