by Evelyn Beck
YOU MAY NEVER have met Archie, but perhaps you’ve spent some time with
Gopher or Jeeves. Looking back through search engine history is a bit like
browsing through a little black book. It was 1990 when Archie, the first search
engine, premiered. Then came Gopher and then many more, including Excite, Yahoo,
WebCrawler, Lycos, InfoSeek, AltaVista, Looksmart, Hotbot, Ask Jeeves, Northern
Light, and MSN Search. Some of these are still around, some were consumed by
other companies, and some folded. The current dominant force in search engines,
Google, debuted in 1998. More recent entrants into the field include Gigablast,
Teoma, Nutch, and Dispie. There are also meta search engines that gather results
from multiple search engines; these include Jux2, Dogpile, Clusty, and Mamma.
While Google has achieved the most widespread name recognition, even its
regular users may not be aware of some of its latest tools. And other search
engines can be better for specific needs. Here’s an overview of some of the
latest search engine innovations of particular interest to on-line educators and
their students.
Academic search engines
Some search engines focus on scholarly sources. Google
Scholar, operating since late 2004 in a beta version (that is, still under
development), offers up links to peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints,
abstracts and technical reports from academic publishers, professional
societies, preprint repositories and universities, in addition to more widely
available web scholarship articles. Two science search engines are Scirus
and Citeseer. Also of interest is Librarians’
Index to the Internet, which offers a searchable, browsable collection of
over 16,000 high-quality Web sites.
Magazine search engines
FindArticles.com offers free access
to full-text articles from many academic, industry and general interest
magazines, including Comparative Literature, Essence, Golf Digest,
Instructor, The Rural Educator, the Saturday Evening Post, Sierra,
and Teaching History, with archives dating back to 1984. Links are also
available to magazines that charge for their articles.
MagPortal.com offers free access to
full-text articles from several dozen magazines, including American History,
Business Week, Christianity Today, Fast Company, The New American, Nursing
Management, Smithsonian, and Scientific American. Search by topic,
and classify the results by quality of match, date, publication, or category.
Blog search engines
Several search engines specialize in locating blogs, or Weblogs, which are
increasingly popular tools in education. Bloglines,
which is owned by Ask Jeeves, allows you to search by subject. For each hit, you
can see a preview, subscribe, or see related blogs. Other blog search engines
include Technorati and Feedster,
but these seem to yield fewer substantive results.
Audio and video search engines
FindSounds is a sound search engine
that allows you to locate online resources for many sound clips, from musical
instruments to animals to vehicles to human and gadget noises. SpeechBot
allows you to search audio and video files of such programs as Car Talk and
American Forces Radio and Television Service Radio News. AOL
Search, which is in the beta version, offers audio and video clips of famous
speeches, films, TV shows, music videos and news. Google
Video Search, also in beta, offers extended videos from 26 TV stations,
including CNN, PBS, Fox News, and several San Francisco affiliates.
Image search engines
Some of the best image search engines are Yahoo
Images, Google Images, Ask
Jeeves Pictures, AltaVista Images,
and Picsearch. Google bills itself as
the most comprehensive, with over one billion images, but Yahoo Images received
first place in the 5th Annual Search Engine Watch Awards from SearchEngineWatch
because it has greatly expanded its image database and because it keeps its
images “fresher.”
Geographic search tools
Google Earth offers satellite images of
anywhere on earth from an altitude of 3,000 feet, and you can use overlay
commands to see lodging, roads, terrain, dining, geographical borders, as well
as information from volcanoes to crime statistics. You can also get maps and
directions, as you can from many other search engines.
Special Google features
Google continues to expand its reach. Its book search allows you to search the
full text of books. Its personalized search, currently in beta version, alters
your search results based on what you’ve searched for in the past. And in its
quest to be the Web user’s one-stop shop, Google also allows you to track
packages, check a flight status, find a phone number, get definitions of words
or phrases, figure currency conversions, find the answer to a mathematical
equation, and more—all directly from its search page. And like most search
engines, it now has a question and answer feature modeled after Ask Jeeves,
which allows users to ask a direct question. This feature is particularly
popular with students.