September 2007 Archive

WiseNut Defunct

Gary noticed that WiseNut, the search engine that has done next to nothing for several years, is now defunct. Owner LookSmart, a long time bit player in search engines and directories now has no Web search engine or directory. Its only two remaining properties now appear to be Furl and FindArticles.

Salaries, Overlap, and the Perils of Phrase Searching

Summer's over, so it's time to start posting and updating SearchEngineShowdown again. I'll start off with yet another screencast of unique results found at only one or two search engines, but this search is also an example of the peril of relying too heavily on lengthy phrases for finding the best answers. The story: I ran a quick search at Google in response to a question at the reference desk about the starting salaries in engineering. I found a site with data from a 2005 NACE survey. Since the NACE site only makes its data available for a fee, I thought I'd try a phrase search for the most recent report. Unfortunately, "nace salary survey fall 2007" found nothing at Google. Yahoo (and a few days later, Live) was the only search engine I tried that found some results, which gave the information for which I was looking. Yes the lesson from this example was more than just to be sure to check more than one search engine. There is also the lesson about relying too heavily on phrase searching.

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