Report Search Engines

If last week I was writing a post about web browsers, today I am going to write a report about search engines. Search engines are vital in the modern Internet surfing. Every time one looks for information on the web, a search engine is being used to search for this information. As you have probably already guessed, the most important and well-known search engine is Google, since it is the search engine most web browsers have as de-facto, as well as the most used and popular. However, apart from Google, I am going to report on a total of 5 different search engines that I use more commonly and others that not os often, and I am going to explain their characteristics and what they are specialized on. By the specialization I mean what type of topics they are good to search.

Let's start with Google. Google is mostly a broad search engine used to browse anything you can think of, therefore it is not specialized uniquely in one topic. However, it has numerous features, as one might think, since about 85% of the World Wide Web users, use Google as their search engine. The Google search features include more than 40 options or keywords to modify the type of search. Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google, Inc., and is the most-used search engine on the Web. Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services. Beyond the original word-search capability, Google Search provides more than 22 special features, such as: similar synonym words; weather forecasts; time zones; stock quotes; maps; earthquake data; movie showtimes; airports; home listings; sports scores, etc.There are special features for numbers: prices, money/unit conversions, temperatures, general calculations, and so on. 



Next up is Yahoo!. This search engine is probably second up on popularity, and has improved greatly over the years. Like Google, it is a search engine used to browse about everything you can imagine, therefore it is not used uniquely for a certain topic. There are features that the creators of Yahoo! have included in the search engine in order to compete against Google. The first innovative feature added by Yahoo was Search Assistant, an integrated pane that combined autocomplete and related searches. Search Assistant was heavily inspired by Ask.com's left sidebar, but it included a distinctive feature that made it less obtrusive: the pane is only displayed if you stop typing for a couple of seconds or when your typing slows.Probably the most impressive new feature in Yahoo Search and the only one that's not yet live is SearchMonkey, a way for site owners to enrich the snippets with structured information. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites -- ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data -- directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.

 
Third up is About.com. I personally use this search engine quite a lot, since it provides information about many different topics and this information is usually really well-written and very clear. Most of its information comes from their own site, therefore it has a huge amount of information for the use of its users. Recently, due to its increasing popularity, it has added different sections for different article with different topics, from money, to housing, to science...mostly anything can be found. I personally recommend this for any type of search, of any topic, like Google or Yahoo!. 

Fourth on the list is Linkedin. Although I personally do not use it, I am sure that on the future I am going to use this search engine that it now used world-wide in order to search for jobs. Just last year, 5.7 billion professionally-oriented searches were done in Linkedin. Apart from browsing different jobs or people that have certain characteristics, Linkedin has now updated itself and has several new features, and some of these include: Auto-complete,  that as you type your search term you’ll be prompted with options for what you may be looking for, and the more you search, the better it will get at predicting what you want; Suggested searches that is  when you type in a search term such as “product manager” you’ll see example search queries for people or jobs related to product manager as well as a preview of top results to help you find what you’re looking for in one click, and so on.



Last but not least is Scirus. Scirus is a science search engine dedicated to only searching science-specific content. At the time of this writing, Scirus searches over 250 million science-specific web pages, filtering out those results that are not science related in order for you, the user, to quickly pinpoint what it is that you're looking for. It is used uniquely for science, therefore if you want to find information about any science-related topic, this is the search engine for you.



In conclusion, there are thousands and thousands of search engines. Although Google is the most popular and most used, there are several other, even more specialized in certain topics, such as Scirus mentioned above for science, that can find more specific results. Therefore, the search engine world is very broad, and in the end, one will use the one he most likes.