25 Metasearch Engines exercises
Integrated meta-search
Your task today is to determine how well each of the integrated meta-search engines compare to the two most popular search engines. You should do the following:
- Devise a moderately complex search related to your term project (use phrases, multiple words, stuff like that).
- Submit the query to each of the tools below.
- For each tool, count the number of relevant results among the top 10 results delivered by the site.
- When you are done, record each of the numbers in the table below. You can use the template below to put your data into the table.
- You need to do this before leaving today's class.
yourName
Search tools | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
User | Yahoo | Search | Info | ixQuick | Mamma | Clusty | DogPile | |
Susan Kennedy | 5 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
Hernando Flowers | 6 | 6 | 5 | 8 | 6 | 3 | 9 | 6 |
Daniel Nicholls | 6 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 7 | 4 | 7 | 5 |
Caitlin De Gregorio | 6 | 7 | 7 | 6 | 7 | 3 | 8 | 6 |
Brian Hendricks | 7 | 8 | 9 | 8 | 10 | 3 | 5 | 6 |
Tyler Hauck | 10 | 10 | 4 | 6 | 7 | 7 | 0 | 6 |
Paige Laytos | 5 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 4 |
Eric Brackmann | 7 | 6 | 8 | 5 | 8 | 1 | 9 | 6 |
Dylan Burkhardt | 10 | 8 | 8 | 10 | 7 | 6 | 7 | 7 |
Jennifer Stanczak | 7 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 4 | 2 | 6 | 6 |
Tim Muir | 7 | 8 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 9 |
Roopak Pati | 9 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 9 | 5 | 10 | 7 |
Andrew Hermatz | 9 | 7 | 3 | 9 | 6 | 3 | 0 | 9 |
Wins (Google/other) | 7/3 | 6/4 | 3/6 | 5/6 | 12/1 | 6/6 | 8/1 |
Results: Both Info and ixQuick compared favorably to Google (with Clusty doing equally as well as Google); apparently, you need not spend any time at Mamma.
Unified meta-search
- Go to Soovle and enter the query that you used above. Watch the interface. Press the right arrow key.
- Go to Search.IO
- Enter your query. Press enter to submit the query. Now switch between search engines.
- Now change from “Search Engines” to “News” and then press the “Go” button. Again, switch between search engines.
- Go to Joongel
- Enter your query. Click on the “Search” button to submit the query. Now switch between search engines.
- Click on the Joongel icon in the upper left corner to go back to the home page.
- Type in your query again, change to the “News” category, and then click on the “Search” button. Now you'll see that you have a choice of submitting the query to News sites, Newspapers, or Blogs. Click on whatever you want and see the results.
- Now switch to a new category by clicking on “Switch Category” in the upper right corner. Choose whatever category you want.
- Go to Zuula
- Enter your query and press enter to submit it.
- The results from one search engine (probably Google) will appear. Click on a different tab to see the results from another search engine.
- Now click on “Blog” at the top of the page in order to see blog results for this query.
- You can now click on different tabs to see the results from another blog search engine.
- Go to IntelWays
- Enter your query and press enter to submit it.
- The results from one search engine (probably Google) will appear.
- Click on “General” at the top of the page to change to a set of general web search engines.
- Now click on any of the buttons below your query to change to a different search engine.
- Now click on “News” at the top of the page in order to see the possible news search engines.
- You can now click on one of these news search engines to see its results for this query.
page revision: 45, last edited: 01 Dec 2008 17:43