Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Nifty visual search and compare site

I just read in ResearchBuzz about a nifty web site (I don't see an actual name for it) that visually compares Yahoo and Google results. Each result is a dot. Mouse over it to see the URL, and click on it to bring up the page. The dots are blue, and connected by blue lines, if the result is found from both engines, and clear otherwise. My searches had very few blue dots. NOTE: This description does not do the page justice. Check it out for yourself.

I found it pretty dramatic to see how little overlap there was and how the types of results varied. For example, my search on how to use RSS to add content to your web site got more relevant results from Yahoo than Google. This was an important lesson to me, both a reminder of the lack of overlap and a reminder that Google is not only not always the best search engine, it's not always the best general commercial engine. This site might be a helpful tool for illustrating these points to students.

It is probably no surprise to any of you that I have heard these points before, but seeing it this way brought it home in a way that the lectures never did. Might that be yet another lesson?!

1 Comments:

Blogger Freya said...

I hope it works well for you. I'd love to hear how it works out for you in class!

10:49 AM  

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