What is effectiveness when comparing search engines on the internet? Search engines locate and retrieve information on the internet by searching for key word(s) or phrases. What is effective to one person may be totally useless to another. For this review I have decided it would be effective if it was useful or valuable to the needs of a college student. As I did research for this essay, I find that I am like many other college students who don’t really know how to do a proper internet search and use the tools that are out there.
Researchers with Northeastern Illinois University conducting research on what tools college students use “found that only 7 out of 30 conducted what a librarian might consider a reasonably well-executed search”.1 I found this essay difficult because of this and have had to dig through a lot of material.
I decided to do a little research myself by inputting the same search word in Google and Bing search engines: tomatoes. Goggle produced 193,000,000 results in about .08 seconds while Bing produced 73,000,000 both having Wikipedia as the number 1 site. Both in speed and relevancy the sites seemed to produce similar results.
Google has strengths such as offering offers many databases and specialized databases such as .edu, .mil, and .gov. Google has a specialty for scholarly research called Google Scholar Beta2: you can search more relevant sources such as articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
Bing is a Microsoft search engine still in the process of growing and developing. Bing-vs-google.com3 is a web site that you could enter a search and compare the results side by side with Bing and Google. I didn’t see much difference. In actuality the related searches seemed almost duplicates.
I think as I do my searches I need to visit our library more often, learn academic search engines and enlist the aid of our librarians.
1- ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries, on the Internet at http://www.erialproject.org/2011/08/usatoday-ih/ http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-08-22/Study-College-students-rarely-use-librarians-expertise/50094086/1 (vistied September, 08, 2011).
2- Blog@BOU, Online education news and resources, on the Internet at http://bestonlineuniversities.com/2011/20-useful-specialty-search-engines-for-college-students/ (visited September, 08, 2011).
3- http://www.bing-vs-google.com/?q=tomatoes on the Internet (visited September, 08, 2011)
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