cacharro 21: Searching hither and tither

We covered the internet in our IT lessons at school. It's reassuring to know that all three search engines recommended to us - askjeeves, dogpile, and google - are still alive after 10 years of google domination. So this was a bit like a trip down memory lane, except with flashy new designs.


I searched for three things:

1. My partner's name
   As the joint author of a number of academic papers, as well as having a photography blog, and the usual social network things, I thought this would be a better choice than my name. Bing and Yahoo turned up the same results with her blog first, followed by a scientific commons entry, members of her lab, and a list of papers. I was impressed that the blog came out first. Ask¹ seemed to favour social media first followed by individual blog posts and was a little disappointing.
2. Enrique Vila Matas - a reasonably well known Spanish writer in Spain but with only two books published in English.
   Again, Yahoo and Bing were similar: first a wikipedia page, followed by his English website, a facebook entry, his Spanish website, and some interviews. Whereas Ask promoted ebay, amazon along with an irrelevant website on fashion.
   
3. The Aleph - in particular the short story by Jorge Luis Borges although it could also be a number of other things.
   All search engines turned up the same results, exclusively referring to the short story or to an writing about the story.
   

I love Wolfram|Alpha. I have even recommended it to students at the desk as it can be used for getting nice summaries on stocks and indices with much more clarity and information than many other free resources.
I also love Oaister and used it all the time when working in ILLs when looking for PhD theses. I recommended it for use at the desk as well for searching for theses as it can often save the student time and an ILL fee.
Scirus and TechXtra were new to me and I like them but I need more playing to know their strengths and weaknesses.

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1 because it's not love but the bomb that will bring us together... sorry for the Smiths joke.