Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Does the search engine matter?

The search bar on the Internet has become a necessity of our everyday lives. I wanted to see how long I could go without using a search engine, I broke down in thirty minutes without me really realizing it. I needed to go onto a website but couldn't really remember the sites name, but it was a pretty popular brand and thought it would be under the name of the brand. I typed it in, and it was incorrect and a bunch of alternative sites I could have meant popped up. I looked through them to find the site( which I did) and got the the site from their. About ten minutes went by and I realized that I had used a search engine to get to the web page and was very disappointed with myself.

Search engines have made everything fast and convenient. Just think about it, if you are discussing something and are not sure on a certain fact what do you say " lets google it". But how do you know which search engine to use. There are so many with google being the most popular. Does it really matter which search engine to use? Do all search engines bring up the same stuff? Or are the top sites the sites that pay to be on the top?

I think all search engines do a good job showing which sites are ads. After a search you can see which search results are ads with a blue box around them. Now the sites that show up after the ads are determined different ways with all the different search engines. For example Google has this really long confusing algorithmic equation they use, which pretty much boils down to the sites with the most clicks. So the top search results will be the sites that the most people have visited.

Now this site shows which search engines to use for different subject matter. For example it would be better to use the search engine infomine to look up scholarly information. This site is pretty interesting I have always just googled any information I need, but looking at this I could save lots of time looking through articles that are not useful to me if I just use a different search engine.

This image was retrieved from:
qwickstep.com

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