Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Searching for Search Engines

For my experiment with search engines, I tried the same search term on Yahoo, Mooter, and Exalead. I'd never heard of two of them before, I had very little idea of what to expect. Just to be contrary, I picked a rather esoteric term (Zivio Ethnic Arts Ensemble- the name of my dance group) and let each chew on it.

I was impressed with Yahoo's results, because the very first item was my group's homepage. The other top 5 results were variations on that theme, such as performance calendars and other options from our website's menu. Mooter and Exalead (who came up with these names, anyway?) didn't quite make that standard. The first item on each list was the same, and while it was the performance calendar for my group- which is pretty close- I didn't see the main page anywhere. Nor were the rest of the top 5 in each site quite as closely related as the Yahoo results (there were also several instances of repeats).

I was alittle surprised not to see Google on the list. Although I suppose it's too well known to be a tool for encouraging people to explore.

Well, I'm too tired to write more now. I'll finish this later in the event that I get up the energy. Apologies if this post didn't make sense.

No comments: