We seek it here, we seek it there

Trying to find information on the internet can be very frustrating , particularly when looking for Conductive Education, as there are so many choices of where to search, but there is not just Google out there. An item on the BBC News website today about the re-vamp of Ask to try and raise their hit rate

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7646579.stm

highlights the difficulties that other search engines have in competing with Google, which has very good search features and is almost everyone's first choice now. But there are others, and a considerable number worth considering when searching the world wide web.

Before starting remember:

1. Every search you make produces a small snapshot of what is available at that particular time. Searching again later could well produce different results.

2.Search engines can be temperamental and illogical and results depend on the search engine, country version and time of day.

3. Some things are hard to find because they are poorly ranked or even ignored by some search engines.

4. Sometimes pages are changed or even deleted and a way of finding them is using the Wayback Machine at http://web.archive.org/

5. Sometimes it is possible to find items by using BananaSLUG, a long tail search engine, which will combine your term with random words from a category of your choice at http://bananaslug.com/ I've found some interesting material on CE using this that I didn't come across elsewhere.

6. Perhaps most important of all, remember anyone can put any thing up on the internet, so it is up to you to exercise quality control.

So don't stick to Google, use Yahoo, Exalead, Bananaslug, Lycos, Hotbot, AltaVista, Allthe web, Ask etc and help keep these engines alive. On trying a European engine, Acoona, this week I discovered that it was no longer operational 'due to an overwhelmingly competitive search market'. Shame, as I had found this one particularly useful for tracking CE news.