Search Engine Comparison

LSC 548

Name of Search Engine (Name of First Search Engine) (Name of Second Search Engine)
What is the URL?  http://www.google.com/  http://www.lycos.com/
What is it used for? • General Searching of Subjects.
• Children's Books.
• Catalogs - Allows user to search catalogs that were never before online.
•Translates Web Pages - Option to translate web site to another language.
•Phone Book - One can look up phone numbers. Key on name and area code and the phone number is returned quickly.
•File Types - form 1040 - filetype:pdf will get you 1040 forms in pdf format.
• Stock Quotes - Finds the latest stock quotes.
• Cached Links - Google returns URLs from its stored cashed. One can easily click on the Cache link to get the latest web page. When you click on Cache the searched word is highlighted in RED.
•Similar Pages - Click on the Similar Pages link and do another search for similary web pages.
• Who Links to You? - Key in link:www.uri.edu/artsci/lsc/index.html
in the google search box and hit enter. It will return the URL for those web pages that are linked to this keyed in site.
• Site Search - Key in admission site:www.uri.edu to go directly to the URI admissions web site.
• I'm Feeling Lucky - Brings the user right to the first web page in the search results. (It saves a step.)
• Dictionary Definitions - When your search is done, any resulting underlined word can be clicked on to get a definition.
• Street Maps - Key in 94 West Alumni Avenue, Kingston, RI into the Google Search Box and Hit enter. Choose between Yahoo Maps and MapQest. 		• General Searching of Subjects.
• Children's Books.
•Yellow Pages and White Pages - Look up phone numbers. Not as direct as Google.
•MP3s - Gives directions on how to search and download music.
•Stocks - Finds the latest stock quotes.
•Multi Media - Finds pictures, audio and video clips. But may need extra software added to view or hear.
How easy or difficult is it to figure out how to search? It is easy to figure out how to search. The blank is filled in and one simply has to key in a term they want searched and it will find web pages with that term on it. It seems easy to figure out how to search. Like Google, it has a place to key in a term or words and simply hit search.
How do you navigate through it? One navigates through Google by looking down the returned web pages and see if there is a web page for the subject that are looking. At the top of this page under the Google logo, there are four tabs.
  • The Web tab is the default and this is where one looks to see if there is information that is useful to you.
  • If you click on the Images tab there are digitized pictures that are possibly useful. When I was looking for pictures for my web pages of certain books I would find them here.
  • The next tab is Groups. This is a search of listserv groups that might have discussions posted about your topic. I found interesting book reviews here.
  • That last tab is for Directory. It seems to do a search of your term on all the open directories on the web. It returns web pages that have your term in it. I was searching for "Your First Garden Book" by Marc Brown and it returned 8 web pages with Marc Brown's name on it. At the top it does give the path of the directory for google. For example, Kids and Teens ==> People and Society ==> Biography ==> Authors ==> Brown, Marc.
    		• One navigates through Lycos by looking down the returned web pages.

    There are also four tabs at the top of the page. These tabs are Lycos Home, Site Map, My Lycos and Lycos Mail. These take you out of the site search and are not part of the search.

    At the bottom of the search page there is a question. It is: "NEED A SECOND OPINION? HotBot, AltaVista, Overture, Web Directory, Alltheweb, Direct Hit " This allows you to use one of these other search engines to continue your query.

    Lycos also lets you search through the results. There is a place to key in your search query. There were 27 sites returned for my query and I could again search using I searched for "Tolon", the author's middle name and the name of one of his sons. It returned 8 sites.

    How many Web sites are covered? On June 4, 2002 Google Searched 2,073,418,204 web pages. (See *Notes below.) I don't know but I found this: "Second Opinion: Use the "Need a Second Opinion?" link if you can't find what you're looking for with Lycos Search - this allows you to search HotBot, the Web Directory, DirectHit, Overture, and Alltheweb to find search results relevant to your interests. With HotBot, a property of Lycos, you can query "games" against the more than 110 million documents in its database. The Web Directory lets you search over a million Web sites chosen and reviewed by Directory editors while DirectHit offers sites ranked by popularity to make sure the most important sites appear first. Overture delivers bottom line results to over 49,000 advertisers by driving millions of targeted customers to their web site every month and Allthweb has more than 600 million documents in its database, which they refresh very frequently." Lycos then searches the full text of the more than 110 million documents in its database, finds all documents that fit your criteria, sorts them according to their relevance, and returns a list of documents in the form of abstracts and hyperlinks.
    What are some searching tips? The Basics of Google Search

    To enter a query into Google, just type in a few descriptive words and hit the 'enter' key (or click on the Google Search button) for a list of relevant web pages. Since Google only returns web pages that contain all the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. Your new query will return a smaller subset of the pages Google found for your original "too-broad" query.

  • Capitalization Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for "george washington", "George Washington", and "gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN" will all return the same results. Word Variations (Stemming)

  • To provide the most accurate results, Google does not use "stemming" or support "wildcard" searches. In other words, Google searches for exactly the words that you enter in the search box. Searching for "googl" or "googl*" will not yield "googler" or "googlin". If in doubt, try both forms: "airline" and "airlines," for instance.

    Advanced Search Tips.

    Yes. This is the URL that allows changing the default search logic. http://www.google.com/advanced_search.
    You can Find results with all of the words, with the exact phrase, with at least one of the words, or without the words.
    You can also check news stories for the past week. or do a page specific search or a topic specific search.

    		• The Basics of Lycos Search

    To begin a powerfully simple Lycos search:

    1. Locate the Search toolbar at the top of http://www.lycos.com.

    2. Type the word or phrase you are looking for into the text-entry box after "Search:"

    3. Click the "Go" button.

    Search Box: The search box is the heart of Lycos Search: Here that you can enter your search terms (games), and allow Lycos to bring you back links to the information you need. Be sure the search terms you enter in the search box are specific - this will help ensure that the Lycos Search returns the most relevant results available. Once you click "GO," the Lycos catalog is queried and all available information related to your search term(s) is arranged on the "Search Results" page. The Search Results Page itself can be a powerful tool for organizing the Web and further refining your search.

    Advanced Search Tips.

    Word Filters

  • Should include search term in the Text, Title, URL or Referring URL.

  • Must include search term in the Text, Title, URL or Referring URL.

  • Not include search term in the Text, Title, URL or Referring URL.

    URL/SITE FILTER:

    Only Include PHRASE: restricts to site only.

    FILTER: Exclude PHRASE: (e.g. lycos.com, lycos, .com) Excludes sites from search.

    LANGUAGE Restrict search to single language only. These are the choices.

    ADULT FILTER Filter out adult content Filter out adult, hate, violence and weapons content with a password-protected Search Guard

    CATALOG LYCOS DIRECT Hit web category editorial results overture. Only the Lycos catalog supports the filters selected above. To continue searching with this catalog and ignore your filter selections above, click on the Submit Search button, otherwise select Lycos.

    • Can you change the default search logic? No. This is according to Phil Bradley who says you cannot refine the searches. http://www.philb.com/compare.htm.
    		No. This is according to Phil Bradley who says you cannot refine the searches. http://www.philb.com/compare.htm.
    Can you change the way in which results are displayed? No. Not that I could tell. There is a button that can be clicked to search news and photos but there were no hits for my search.
    Keyed in the following in the Search Box for both Google and Lycos. "your first garden book" by marc brown "your first garden book" by marc brown
    How many results did you receive? For the search "Your First Garden Book" by Marc Brown there were 67 results received. Google keeps the query in the query box. If one leaves the page for a while and goes back they know what the query was. I like this.
    I just realized that The Google search says that there are about 60 results and it breaks it into 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40 and 41-49. There is a disclamer at the end of the search results. It is: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 49 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." The same concept must be behind why the result number of URL's is different from the number of results found. They are eliminating very similar sites.     		For the Lycos search for "your first garden book" by marc brown there were 35 results. Each page has 10 of the results shown on it. But as I went through what I thought was 3 1/2 pages ended up being 3 pages. It urls ended at 27 when I went through then one by one. This is confusing to me.
    How current are the results? All links seemed to work. Some sites were old but the book is 18 years old. There were several links that I got a 404 error message.
    What proportion of the results were relevant? 47 out of 60 hits were relevant. I had 100 percent relevancy. The proportion is 1:1. The others 13 were not displayed because the sites were too similar. This is impressive. There were 8 relevant sites out of 27. This makes 1/3 of the hits relevant.
    Was the amount of detail displayed with the results adequate? Yes. All the search words were highlighted in Bold and it made it easier to see the results were relevant. Not really. Marc and Brown were Bold and the URL than is highlighted separate words "by, book, garden, and your. It picked up the Brown University URL on the 5th hit. I could have used a better search. Hits 20 and 21 were relevent. The are are irrelevant. Out of the 27, 5 had the author I was looking for.
    Was the order in which the results were displayed evident and/or logical? But, I could not see the logic in how the URL's were displayed. One did not seem more relevant that the other. I think it was in the proper order for the search I did. It looked for the Title of the book first because it was in quotes. Then the hits were done on by and marc and brown because they were not in quotes.
    What are the strengths/weaknesses? One strength is that you can search your results. Just key in the term in the window that is there for this function. Google can search pdf files.
    weakness: Google does not have news.     		It has news and google does not. Lycos is a portal google is not. weakness: Can't refine searches.
    How often is it updated? Google updates its index as often as necessary, so updated or outdated link submissions are not necessary. We should be able to pick them up during each crawl.
    From the FAQ to the Webmaster. Do I need to submit updated and/or outdated links and pages to Google?

    1 day to 1 month according to http://www.philb.com/compare.htm (June 21, 2001).     		2-3 weeks according to http://www.philb.com/compare.htm (June 21, 2001).
    What is the e-mail address to submit questions?   help@google.com   information@infospace.com
    On a scale of 1 to 10 (1=poor, 10=superior), rate each search engine. 10. Search took 0.05 seconds. 8. I did not like navigating the results. I went to the bottom of the web sites and I wanted to go back to the top to see what the first web sites were. I had to use the back key to get there. The query was still there.
    *Notes. My bibliogrphy site showed up in the google search. I never registered my web page. It is impressive that google actually does look at all web pages. I am excited to have my web page show up in a google search! Here is the result: Bookpush bibliography ... New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1987. Brown, Marc. Your First Garden Book. Boston : Little, Brown, c1981. Bunting, Eve. Sunflower House. ... www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~matthews/ bibliographygarden.html - 3k - Cached - Similar pages My web site did not show up in the Lycos search.
    Designed by Elizabeth Toms Matthews
    University of Rhode Island
    Graduate School of Library and Information Studies
    LSC548 - Herb Carson
    Last Updated 06 / 18 / 2002
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