Search Engine Fun

Our task this week was to evaulate three search engines based on the quality of search results. The Big 3 - Google, Yahoo!, and MSN were off limits. We had to find three more obscure search engines to judge. I chose the three that I thought had the most interesting names: Dogpile, Clusty, and Hotbot. Doesn't sound like a collection of search engines, does it? Well, let's give them all a test drive. The key words that I searched for were 'wikis education.'

1. Dogpile - The first thing I noticed is that when you click on one of the result links, your page pops up in a separate window. Some people might like that. I am not used to it, as the search engine that I normally use, Yahoo!, doesn't do that. I was not too impressed with the results of the search. Some of the links it provided were farther down the list than I would have thought, and vice versa. For example, Create a Free Wiki was number 3, which is too high. And, Wiki in Education, which contains both of the keywords, was number 11. Conclusion: Cool name, not so cool results. Let's continue.
2. Clusty - I liked this site right away, because the links didn't open in a new browser. I like that for some reason. The results of the search on this engine were more of what I was expecting. All of the Top5 searches at least contained the keywords in the title of the link. I saw some of the same links that I did on Dogpile, but they were farther down the list on Clusty, and rightly so in my opinion. Overall, I like this one much more that Dogpile. Well, let's see what the Hotbot has to offer.
3. Hotbot - Similar to Clusty the Clown, the links didn't open in a new browser, which I liked. I also liked the overall clean appearance of this site. The results appeared at first to be better than Dogpile, but not as good as Clusty. But, one of the links in the Top 5 didn't even work. That is not a good sign for a search engine.

Based on this one keyword search, I would say that Clusty was by far the best search engine. It's definitely the only one that I would possibly consider using in the future. There are so many resources available on the web these days, that if something doesn't work well one time, I tend not to go back there. In this case, Dogpile and Hotbot did not perform well, so that is the last time I will go there.

By the way, the highest ranking site that I got was EDUCAUSE REVIEW. It was #2 on Dogpile, #8 on Clusty, and #1 on Hotbot. What about you guys?