My search topic was “Great Danes”. Google gave me 22,100,000 hits, and the first hits it showed me were images, even though I hadn’t asked for images.
Here is a screenshot of the first 5 hits:
Then I tried a number of other online meta-search engines, and got the best results from Clusty.com with 274,000 hits. Clusty accesses Live, Open Directory and Ask.com.
By this time I’d downloaded Copernicus, even though I didn’t want to after some of the posts I’d seen in the discussion board. I noticed that while Copernicus will search a number of different search engines, you need to tell it how many hits from each search engine you want. It was initially defaulted to 10 hits per search engine, and to go through 11 search engines (AltaVista, AOL Search, Ask.com, Copernic, Enhance Interactive, FastSearch, LiveSearch, Lycos, Mamma.com, Netscape Netcentre and Yahoo). Any of these search engines except for Copernic, Enhance Interactive and Mamma.com can be turned off. At 10 hits per search engine I got 43 hits, so I reset the default to 100 hits per search engine and got 416 hits, with the list saying none came from Mamma.com.
Each of these hits came from a number of different sites.
On first glance, Google gives me a better number of hits and Clusty comes in second. Unless I’m going to go in and reset the number of hits from each search engine that Copernicus gives me, it comes a bad third, particularly seeing as it has to be loaded to your computer, whereas Clusty.com and Google are both online. As further contrast, I also searched using Mamma.com. This site brought up 66 hits, most of which came from Google. So, if Mamma.com is using Google, and Copernic is using Mamma.com, that means that Copernic is also using Google as a search engine.
Considering that the topic of my search was “Great Danes”, there is no way to do a Boolean search on that topic unless I was going to try to ensure that I was only getting information from one particular site. If I only wanted information from Australia, I would use Google and click the radio button for Australia. If I didn’t want information from Denmark, I would Google it with the search field of [ “Great Danes” –“de”].
To get information coming only from university sources, I would either put +”.edu” into the search engine or go into the advanced settings and tell the search engine there to only look in the .edu domain. Doing an advanced Google search on “Great Danes” only in the .edu domain gave me 98,000 hits. The same search run through as a normal Google search as a Boolean search gave me 801,000 hits, through Clusty gave me 7,180 hits and through Copernic gave me 487 hits. Once again, I’d choose Google over Copernic. And as a metasearch engine, I’d choose Clusty because it doesn’t have to be downloaded to my computer.
The three screenshots above come from the following URLS:
• Google = www.google.com.au
• Clusty = www.clusty.com
• Copernic = downloaded from www.copernic.com, released by Copernic Inc
Did a screen dump of each of the web pages showing my search results (print screen) then (in the beginning) pasted it into a word document. All my blog entries have been saved as a word document in my own computer before putting them online, just in case something went wrong and everything went missing. I then pasted it into Paint Shop Pro, where I saved it as a .gif file so that I can easily put it into the blog.
Copernicus has now been deleted from my system. Or at least it will be when I reboot, according to the little grey box that jumped up in front of my face.
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