Week Eight (part two)

I researched “fruit fly migration” on Exalead, Clusty, Mooter, Kartoo, and Yahoo. I was surprised by the results.

Although the graphics were attractive, Kartoo’s web diagram pulled very few relevant results. However, it did include an intriguing site I will have to investigate further – brightsurf.com (a resource for science information). Overall, I found the presentation and results confusing and convoluted.

Mooter and Yahoo pulled almost identical results. I expected Yahoo to bring up more commercial links, but the first 11 results were mostly .org and .edu domains and included Britannica and Wikipedia. Mooter initiated the search with a web diagram separating the words in the search. I chose “all results”, which lead to a results list very similar to the Yahoo search with several commercial sites listed first.

I liked Clusty and Exalead the best of all search engines investigated. Both went directly from the search to a results list, which included a sidebar with related terms. Exalead included formats, languages and file types in the sidebar. I also liked that Exalead included a preview image of the file in the results list. Exalead included .org, .net, .gov and .com domains in the results.

From this one search there was overlap in the results on all four search engines investigated. Exalead was my personal favorite of the search engines, because of the variety of domains including the deep net, the relevance of the hits and the presentation.