Internet Search Engines

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Internet Search Engines - Bing

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Go to the Bing homepage. Locate the Search tips, Help, Directions, or something that will lead you to a page describing how the search engine works. Find answers to the following questions.

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- How does it add sites to its database? How big is the database?

- (do sites have to register or does the search engine use a “robot” to search them out?)

Bing uses Bingbot to find pages and its web crawler to organize the pages into its database. After searching Bing’s site I could not find an exact answer as to how big the database actually is.

- What kind of searches does it do? (keyword, subject) Does it support all Boolean syntax? (AND, OR, NOT)

Bing’s favorite kind of searches are keyword searches. It does support all of the Boolean syntax.

- Does it give you any general tips for searching.

Bing’s main tips for searching in their engine is to spell correctly and to use words that you believe will be used in the web page you are looking for. That way it will be easier on Bing to find exactly what you are looking for. Also use the tabs for specific searches like if you are looking for images or videos click on the specific tab and then search for what you are looking for.

- What special punctuation is necessary or helpful?

Do not exclude words but be as specific as you can by using and or signs such as +.

- How does it order/rank responses?

Sponsors are listed first and then web results by importance.

- Any special features? (customizing, etc.)

Their search assist will give you other examples of similar searches.

- Overall, how would you rate this search engine? Any special comments?

I have never truly used Bing as my search engine, but as I have read more about it, it seems to be very similar to Yahoo.

Internet Search Engines - Ask

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Go to Ask.com. Locate the Search tips, Help, Directions, or something that will lead you to a page describing how the search engine works. Find answers to the following questions.

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- How does it add sites to its database? How big is the database?

- (do sites have to register or does the search engine use a “robot” to search them out?)

Ask uses an index robot. That index robot analyzes the web as it actually exists. It searches for the most up to date information.

- What kind of searches does it do? (keyword, subject) Does it support all Boolean syntax? (AND, OR, NOT)

Ask likes searched in keywords and also has Ask Answers to ask a question and get an answer. Also like all other search engines you can search a specific thing by clicking the right tab such as images, videos, etc. When using Boolean syntax you have to put AND, OR, and NOT in capital letters. AND is optional because it is implied.

- Does it give you any general tips for searching.

Search with keywords, ask questions and make sure spelling is correct.

- What special punctuation is necessary or helpful?

Same as others us things like +,-,”

- How does it order/rank responses?

Ask uses semantic and extraction capabilities. Ask gives you the exact answer to your question instead of giving you sites to pick to find the answer.

- Any special features? (customizing, etc.)

Find results with all words, exact words , phrases, domain, and language.

- Overall, how would you rate this search engine? Any special comments?

I have never really used Ask.com but now that I have researched more about it and seen what it is all about I am going to start using it more often. It is very nice that you can just ask the search engine a question and it will give you the exact answer.