Searching for the Best Search Engine

Honestly I'd like today's post to consist of these few salient sentences:

GOOGLE IS THE BEST SEARCH ENGINE AND THE ONLY ONE I WANT TO USE. END OF STORY. PERIOD.

Unfortunately, that doesn't really fulfill the assignment. So, using the terms "shadow" and "puppets" I tried several search engines from the list and here's what I found.

Yahoo -

I've used Yahoo before and like the format. It's very similar to Google. It's clean looking, makes sense (but maybe that's just because I'm already familiar with it), and allows the user to search in other categories such as "web, images, video, local, and shopping" (again similar to Google.) I came up with a total of 9,890,000 results, ranging everywhere from YouTube shadow puppet show clips to the Wikipedia page on shadow puppetry, to various puppetry how-to pages. One nice feature Yahoo offers is the "Also try" option where it suggests other possible searches. All in all though I would still rather stick with Google but I do like using Yahoo to read their top news, entertainment, and sports stories.

Clusty -

Right off I noticed the search cluster bar on the left-hand side of the screen. I assume this is meant to help users find more relevant search results. The major portion of the screen resembles Google or Yahoo. As with the other two search engines, Clusty allows the user to also search web, news, images, wikipedia, blogs, and jobs. I thought the wikipedia and blog options were interesting. Clusty brought up 1,022,520 results.

Gravee -

I couldn't even get this page to come up, so that's a big "NO" for Gravee.

Wink -

I pulled up this page and immediately saw the heading, "Where people find people." Hmm, I'm sure this would be useful for some searches but it isn't relevant for mine, unless of course "Shadow Puppets" is the name of a person. Hmmmm . . .

Mooter -

Mooter boasts the slogan, "The Power of Relevance." I have to admit though, outside of the cool sounding name I didn't find this site to be very useful. In all fairness this probably is because I'm not familiar with the layout, but here's what I found. I typed in "shadow puppets" and was immediately taken to a "cluster" (it reminded me of one of those brainstorming webs that we had to do in high school English class.) The web contained several headings such as "uncle orson writing class, puppets, shadow, theatre, series, puppet, and book." In the center was the label, "All Results." "All Results" basically brings up a similar search page as Google, Yahoo, and Clusty, as does another button labeled "I want it ALL!" I spent only a couple minutes here but wasn't that impressed. It's nice that they're trying to pull the most relevant websites out, but even then it's kind of confusing. I mean, do I want to click on the "shadow" tab or the "puppet" tag? Or maybe the "puppets" tab? By the way, what's the difference between "puppet" and "puppets" anyway? Also, every time I clicked on a tab, looked at the results, and then tried to return to the original screen, a message box would pop up saying, "The page you are trying to view contains POSTDATA that has expired from cache . . . blah blah blah . . ." This got old really quickly.

So, it was nice having the chance to explore other search engines but I'm still a Google fan through and through. And since today's post dealt with the "wonderful world" of shadow puppets, here's a relevant clip. Enjoy!