Try to find the answers to the following questions, using at least three of the search engines below.
- What was the French Revolution and when did it occur?
- What are the titles of some recent biographies of Abraham Lincoln?
- What are the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech?
- Is the birthrate in the United States higher or lower than that in Brazil?
- What is the ecu?
| Yahoo! | www.yahoo.com | An excellent, large directory of Web sites, Yahoo! is good for searching broad general topics. | | Google | www.google.com | Google is currently the most popular search engine on the Web. | | | Alta Vista | www.altavista.com | AltaVista is a very good tool for comprehensive and exact searches. Once mastered, it's easy and fast. | | | Infoseek | www.infoseek.com | Despite its smaller index of Web pages, Infoseek's results are on the mark and suitable when searching news stories and Usenet posts. | | | Hotbot | www.hotbot.com | Hotbot's interface requires some work to learn, but is easy to use when preparing exact search queries. Good for finding specific information. | | | Northern Light | www.nlsearch.com | Northern Light searches pay-per-view periodical and book articles and sorts the findings into topic headings. | | | Lycos | www.lycos.com | If you need to locate specific media types, e.g. JPEG files, Java scripts, etc., Lycos may be the engine for you. It also has advanced search abilities. | | | Ask Jeeves! | www.askjeeves.com | A good place to start for beginners and for general queries. It also uses six other search sites simultaneously as well as guiding you through the search. | | | iSleuth.com | www.isleuth.com | This is a specialized collection of more than 3,000 online databases. Like Ask Jeeves, it also searches six other search sites at the same time. Very good for highly specialized searches. | | | Excite | www.excite.com | Another good engine for broad searches, Excite also finds news headlines, company information and sports scores. | | | Metacrawler | www.metacrawler.com | A quick way to find out what's out there, Metacrawler uses Yahoo!, Excite, and five other search engines and then combines the results. | | | Dogpile | www.dogpile.com | Similar to Metacrawler, Dogpile sifts through 13 search engines and scores of on-line news services. Finds are sorted by the search engine that found them. Good way to find out which search tool works best for you. |
Were some questions particularly easy or hard to answer? Why? Were there differences in ease of use of the different search engines? Which did you prefer, and why |
