Matching search engines... Follow-up and Thank-You.

[Allison Ho]

Hello.

For those of you who expressed an interest in the results of our 
class presentation, here is what we did - based a lot on the great 
information/help you guys provided!

We originally wondered about "pinpointing" specific search engines 
with a particular type of library.  The clear concensus from Web4Lib
respondents is that it's much better to try and match search tool 
with information need.  

We chose Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Hot Bot and InfoSeek, and came up
with two test questions (one of more general interest, about the 
game/sport Ultimate, the other more specific/academic? about the 
ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey); 
searched in two ways (simply entering the basic terms, the other 
using "proper" search logic (boolean, nesting etc).  Our hopeful 
objectives was to determine which of these five search tools were the 
most 1) user-friendly and 2) best at relevant retrieval (ie) 
regardless of proper use of search logic).

After our very rudimentary and informal testing, we thought InfoSeek 
was the best overall: for both general and more specific interest searches, 
both in terms of user-friendliness, and good results.

Again, Thank-you very much to all who responded to my request for 
assistance.

Allison  

*******************************************************
Allison Ho, Graduate Student
School of Library, Archival and Information Studies
The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
E-mail: HO at slais.ubc.ca