Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Folks,

This may be of general interest. It comes from the latest issue of MacAddict, but it's of interest to all PC users.

Here are three research and four general search web sites that the article says are better than google:

Research:

1. http://www.answers.com - encyclopedic database
2. http://www.brainboost.com - crawler with proprietary ranking system
3. http://www.factbites.com - crawler with content analysis

General:

1. http://www.a9.com - crawler with customizable results
2. http://www.gigablast.com - crawler with refinement tools
3. http://search.msn.com - crawler with Encarta encyclopedia database
4. http://www.teoma.com - crawler with refinement tools

So, you might want to try these seven sites in addition to google, and in particular if can't find what you're looking for with google.

Thoughts?

I will be posting pointers to this post on the other two 'Ask an Expert" boards.

WOW!!
These ARE better than Google. answers.com is my favorite. Its already my home page

Hi All-

David, thanks for pointing out these other search sites and sharing them with the forum. I also want to mention that Google has some great tools and services that many people may be unaware of.

Click "more" on the upper right above the Google search field or simply go to http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ to see a list of these services, like:

"Print" which lets you search the text of books

and

"Scholar" which lets you search scholarly papers

My personal favorite Google feature is Calculator. I especially like being able to do measurement conversions. Type 'convert 4.5 miles to km' and Google returns '4.5 miles = 7.242048 kilometers'.

Courtney Corda
Science Buddies Staff

P.S. Google is also a generous Science Buddies donor. Thanks Google!

Hi Courtney!

Thanks so much for pointing out the new features of google - I was unaware of them. I'll have to give new features a try; they may impact my search strategy.