Thing # 7 - Beyond Google

Now that you’ve learned about some of Google’s other features, it is time to look beyond Google to other search engines. Some of the more interesting types are clustering search engines that organize your results in categories, specialized search engines that concentrate on specific topics, and social search engines that take user generated content to rank results.

To complete this challenge, you’ll visit two search engines, explore a bit and blog about each. When you explore, look for whatever help the website is offering to new users. It may be the example page offered by Wolfram/Alpha or FAQs or even a short video. Then try a few practice searches. In your blog posts, describe your experience and how or whether you’d use it in the future.

Here are some suggestions to try.

Clustering Search Engine

Carrot2 organizes your search results into topics. So if you search “Java,” the results will be grouped into sites about Java, the computer program, Java, the island and Java, a nickname for coffee. This might be one of the most useful non-Google search engines.

Social Search Engine

Worio adds sites to your Google results that you might miss with your regular keyword search. Look on the right hand side of your results for the Worio suggestions. Worio looks at sites you click on and sites you tag to make better guesses on what you’d be interested in. You don’t have to create an account but for the full Worio Social Search engine experience, a free account is needed. You can share your Worio with friends.

Specializied Search Engine

Wolfram/Alpha searches through the web and databases to answer mathematical and statistical questions. To get started with Wolfram/Alpha, go to its example page: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples and pick something that looks interesting.

A new Google Competitor

Bing is the new general search engine owned by Microsoft. Bing is promoted as being especially good for shopping, images, news, videos and travel information.
A very interesting site called Bing vs. Google runs your search against Google and Bing and displays the results side by side.

Here's a screen shot from Bing vs. Google where the search was Ocean County Library.

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If none of the mentioned search engines look interesting to you or if you want to see more possibilities, go to the notes on the "Emerging Search Technologies Workshop" on OceanNet’s Reference Page for many more suggestions.


You only have to write a blog post for each of the two search engines you explored to complete this challenge.