Search Engines

Well, I have to say, I'm a google girl. I searched for something I've been wondering about: a map of the trails at Fort Ebey State Park near Coupeville. I searched on Google for "Fort Ebey State Park trail map" (not in quotes in the search box) and got a map as my first hit. On Mamma, the same hit came up as #5, and 1-4 didn't even include any evidence of a map, nor even reference to a map. On Dogpile, my hit was #11, though I could see evidence of map references in my other hits (1-10). Rollyo was fair: it didn't give me a direct link to a map, but did give me the wikipedia article with links to a trail map.

So, then I tried to find a schedule for the Guemes Island Ferry. A search on Google for 'guemes island ferry schedule' took me right where I needed to go on the first hit in the list -- the ferry schedule. Dogpile gave me a list of commercial, irrelevant hits at the top of the list, but also took me where I needed to go via the fourth hit on the list. Dogpile was even worse -- a whole long list of irrelevant commercial links, and the link I needed was #5 in the non-commercial list! Rollyo was as good as google in this case.

I also love google for the ability to cache websites -- you can have your search terms highlighted on the web pages in the list of hits. Helps a lot when you're scanning content for something in particular.