POSTING 3 : DIFFERENCES & SIMILARITIES OF SEVERAL SEARCH ENGINES

Before that, do you guys know what is search engines means?
A Search Engine is a tool that enables users to locate information on the World Wide Web. Search engines use keywords entered by users to find Web sites which contain the information sought. Search engines are very large databases that contain information about web pages. Search engines are automatically updated by special programs called "robots" or "spiders" that search the World Wide Web for new content and then report their findings to their database.

http://www.advancedaccess.com/FAQ/searchengines.html

Actually, before this I never try or heard about another search engines like mamma.com, eric digest, dogpile, MSN, Alta Vista and AOL. It is something new for me and this courses have discovered my knowledge about ict so much than before. As Dr. Zaini do hope that by the end of the skbp 1023 course i will be techno-savvy....
Huhu..I do hope so.. 
Oklah..let’s check out the differences & similarities through reading with briefly yeah..


MAMMA.COM

Address: (http://mamma.com)
Mamma.com is a site owned and operated by Copernic Inc. (formerly known as Mamma.com Inc.).
Mamma.com is a "smart" metasearch engine — every time you type in a query Mamma simultaneously searches a variety of engines, directories, and deep content sites, properly formats the words and syntax for each, compiles their results in a virtual database, eliminates duplicates, and displays them in a uniform manner according to relevance. It's like using multiple search engines, all at the same time.
Created in 1996 as a master's thesis, Mamma.com helped to introduce metasearch to the Internet as one of the first of its kind. Due to its quality results, and the benefits of metasearch, Mamma grew rapidly through word of mouth, and quickly became an established search engine on the Internet. Mamma.com's ability to gather the best search results available from top search sources and to provide useful tools to its users has resulted in its receiving multiple Honourable Mentions in the Best Metasearch category in the annual SearchEngineWatch Awards.

YAHOO.COM

(http://www.yahoo.com)
Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo!, Inc. and is currently the second largest search engine on the web, after its competitor Google. Yahoo! Search, originally referred to as Yahoo! provided Search interface, would send queries to a searchable index of pages supplemented with its directory of sites. The results were presented to the user under the Yahoo! brand.



GOOGLE.COM

Address: (http//www.scholar.google.com.my/)
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.
Features of Google Scholar
• Search diverse sources from one convenient place
• Find papers, abstracts and citations
• Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web
• Learn about key papers in any area of research


ERIC DIGEST

Address: (http:www.ericdigests.org/)
Site provides full-text access to thousands of ERIC Digests in many education areas including teaching, learning, special education, home schooling, and charter schools.


MY REFLECTIONS :
In my opinion, all of the three search engines are used to find academic tools. Besides that, all of our searched will be display based on the keyword that we are looking for. Hence, searching information using the different search engines, I can get the chance to choose the best material that I want to pick as the best one. Everything just in finger tip. See, the innovation of our technology nowadays help us a lot and make our tasks easy to solve. I can’t imagine live without this tools…
To compare, google pages load faster than yahoo pages. For yahoo, it takes time..hmmm…guys, be patient yeah….huhu..even sometimes me also not patient to wait..:). Another is the features of the search engines. Mamma .com and yahoo provide tabs for image, video, local, shopping, travel. yellow and white pages. While eric does not have any of it. Besides that, google are more thoughtful and strategic while yahoo are dashing and reactive.
To remark, although the search engines have the differences, those are useful for us as a student to get more information and encouraging knowledge. For me, I am prefer to used google scholar to search for my assignment, while using yahoo for mailing, chatting and for leisure. Hmmm.. how bout eric digest? Actually, it is currently new for me.. after these I must try use this search engines. Who knows it would help me a lot? It is up to us to choose wisely and use the accommodation provided to enhance our live into the positive way.