Icon's Pick: The Top Ten Search Sites
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday February 24, 2001
We examined the most popular search engines and directories and rated them on how well they performed plain-English searches and category searches and how efficiently they cached information and handled advanced and specialised techniques as well as Boolean queries. We checked for the relevance of the first 10 hits and error messages. The following are the top 10 performers. Using a combination of these engines and their power search tools, you should only ever be a few clicks away from your target site or page.
Rating: * * * * 4 1/2
www.google.com
Living up to its reputation as the fastest gun online, Google out-performed rival engines during testing. As well as doing the usual metatag and text scans, it works out how relevant a particular page is by the number of other pages linking to it. It's easy to refine searches using quotation marks or other Boolean commands and advanced searches include a language and children's filter. If an indexed Web page has disappeared you can still read it by downloading Google's cached version. The interface is clean and uncluttered and it doesn't pretend to be anything other than a useful search tool. Click "I'm feeling lucky" to go to the first result automatically.
Yahoo! Australia
Rating: * * * *
www.yahoo.com.au
This is an excellent tool for investigating general topics rather than specific information. Use quotation marks to match exact phrases and * for partial matches, although not all Boolean queries bear fruit. Busy Yahoo! employees have filtered out a lot of the Web junk and you can hunt exclusively for newsgroups, email addresses or people.
AltaVista
Rating: * * * *
www.altavista.com
The occasional broken link shouldn't turn you off this powerful engine. It delivers both specific home pages and documents and gives users the option to scout for products, video, audio and MP3 music files. If you're trying to find reports on a particular news topic from the past two weeks, head for the Media/Topic tool and select news. The Family Filter is handy to protect young minds from Net nasties, or if speed is an issue for your overworked modem, you can customise the results to show Web page sizes. AltaVista also handles plain-English questions well.
LookSmart
Rating: * * * *
www.looksmart.com.au
This Australian directory has built up a strong content team across the globe to review and categorise sites. Although it has made cutbacks recently and lost the LookSmart Live facility, which offered personal search help, it remains an essential bookmark. Enter a keyword or drill down on a topic category to search through "800,000 of the most useful Web sites", and an Australian directory including more than 60,000 sites. Search partners help widen the scope to millions of indexed documents, although we received mixed results with Boolean queries.
Metacrawler
Rating: * * * *
www.metacrawler.com
Metacrawler is useful if you've got a particularly obscure search term and wish to broaden your search quickly beyond your usual tools. This meta-search engine sifts the combined results of several popular engines. You can choose to query up to 14 engines in one click (from AltaVista to WebCrawler), narrow the search by domain/origin, and view results by site, source or relevance.
Anzwers
Rating: * * *
www.anzwers.com.au
You often need to trawl through a few screens to find what you're seeking after using this local search engine, but it has plenty of filtering options to help you narrow down the results. Look for exact phrases, images, audio and video content, or focus on particular countries if you know the likely domain (for example, co.uk). It returns particular indexed pages more than home pages. Its drop-down menu interface will suit some people but probably not impatient types. Anzwers is particularly handy if you're looking for only Australian or New Zealand content.
Northern Light
Rating: * * *
www.northernlight.com
Although it claims to support plain-English queries, Northern Light returned no results for "Who was Australia's first Prime Minister?" Despite this hiccup, this engine is still useful for queries relating to American content. As well as the usual Boolean commands, you can perform fielded searches such as "URL:" to search for words in a Web address, or "COMPANY:" to search for a particular business's content. Its "Power Search" facility lets you limit the operation to particular subjects or documents.
Excite Australia
Rating: * * *
www.excite.com.au
Excite handles plain-English questions and Boolean commands well. There are several filter options for Power Search users, including scanning for Web sites or documents only, and hunting for sites in different languages ranging from Japanese to Swedish. Excite didn't perform brilliantly when hunting for specific sites during testing, but it's still a useful engine for tracking down both local and US content.
Go Eureka
Rating: * * 2 1/2
www.goeureka.com.au
Powered by AltaVista's search engine, Go Eureka puts an Aussie spin on the US giant. It's not a complete authority on local content, but its "super search" is impressive. It lets you perform Boolean queries and filter results by language, date and domain.
Web Wombat
Rating: * * 2 1/2
www.webwombat.com.au
Local engine Web Wombat features crisp design and an Australian and world directory to sift through when doing a category search. It generally matches words and returns any indexed documents rather than home pages. It performed Boolean queries poorly during testing and has few advanced search options.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
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