Thing 12: Other search engines

What?! There are other search engines besides Google! OK, so I am just kidding....kind of. I use Google for 100% of my searches. I think because I have an iGoogle home page it is just so convenient. I like the way the results are displayed. None of the mapping tools like KartOO appealed to me. As someone who is VERY linear, I just want a list of hits. I did not find the mapping of sites helpful to me at all. Maybe some of my students would enjoy using it, but not me. I didn't really find the sites that compare Google, Yahoo, and other search engines very helpful at all either. Maybe I went into this "thing" thinking that google was the best and nothing else would do.

A couple of things that I did like were the metasearch engines. Both Clusty and Dogpile seemed to hold promise for future searches. I also liked how Ask.com had a bar on the left-hand side for narrowing or expanding the search. I thought this was a very nice tool for my 8th graders who still struggle with the concept of narrowing a search or a topic.