Posting 3: Ladies and Gentlemen, Start your Search Engines!

"Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light"
Dylan Thomas (1952)

Its 3 in the morning and I'm starting on my third posting (that explain why I choose the last 2 lines from Dylan Thomas' poem, I wont sleep till my job's one ^^.)

Anyway, as the title suggest, this post is about the search engines. I'm sure most people are very familiar with Google and Yahoo, but not many who knows the existence of Mamma metasearch and ERIC digest (I'm one of them obviously).

First of all, I'm not talking the usual Google search engine that we used frequently. I was talking about Google Scholar. Unlike Google search, Google scholar is more particular in searching for academic materials. Google Scholar has several features such as;

• Search diverse sources from one convenient place
• Find papers, abstracts and citation
• Locate the complete paper through your library on the web
• Learn about key papers in any area of reasearch

Click here for full details

Next is about Yahoo!. Through my observation, Yahoo! is a very common and wide ranged search engine. It serves the users in various ways such as searching for websites, images, news and many more. There is a lot of selection with Yahoo! Some of the features are;

• Yahoo! answers
• Yahoo! messanger
• Yahoo! mail

This is the first time I've heard about Mamma metasearch. I like the tagline for this search engine which is the mother of all search engines. I was quite impressed with Mamma metasearch because it narrow down the number of sites from billions to only a couple of pages. Like any other search engines, Mamma offer searches on videos, shop, travel and etc.

I've also never heard of ERIC digest. What I've discovered about this search engine is that the former ERIC Clearinghouse system was eliminated due to inevitable circumstances. This site provide one way to acces the ERIC Digests education articles produced by the former ERIC Clearinghouse system. More info, find out more by clicking this.

Overall, there are some similarities as well as diferences among the four search engines. Google Scholar can be used to find specific articles regarding scholarly literature which makes it a more similar to ERIC Digest than Yahoo! or Mamma metasearch. However, Google scholar uses its own search engine while ERIC Digest uses Google as a searching tool.

Mamma metasearch and Yahoo! is similar because the two of the search engines provide various areas or fields such as videos, shops, etc, but Mamma metasearch are more refined in the searches unlike Yahoo! that gives billions of links as a feedback.

From my point of view, all the search engines work in their own way. I couldn't say which one is better than the other but for now, I think I'd stick to Google ^^.