This assignment really reminded me of a class assignment in the Information School. At least I don't have to write a 5-page paper on it! I was especially interested in the 2 meta search engines of www.dogpile.com and www.mamma.com, as I didn't have as much experience with them as with the other search engines. I searched for my name in both as the test. I had(somewhat) recently searched on my name in Google, and since I've graduated last year, it pulled up fewer results by far.
My results for the 2 meta search engines? I much prefer www.dogpile.com to www.mamma.com. Both sites pulled up 3 pages of results, and both sites listed which search engines they retrieved the links from. Both sites gave many more results than Google did alone.
But in spite of mamma.com boasting that it gives "intelligent" results, it gave links that only seemed to have "Kathy" in them as well as links that had "Smargiassi" in them. Even when I tried to force it to have an "AND" in the search so it would pull up only those sites with both terms, it appeared to use the "OR" boolean search. That was very annoying.
Dogpile.com on the other hand, gave 3 pages of relevant results. It even pulled up a site, webjunction.com, that had posted a literature pathfinder that I developed as a student. I didn't know that they had that document, but at least they cited me as its author. I was very pleased with the results it came up with. My only caveat is that dogpile is slower than mamma, but it isn't slow enough to be annoying and not worth the better results.
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