There are millions of searches processed every day using basically just a few search engines. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are among the most used, and generally, they provide the information requested. But, you may have noticed that a lot of the pages have absolutely nothing to do with what you wanted. There are many reasons that the information listed may be useless to the searcher. The first is that the search terms may be vague, too inclusive, or simply not needed. If you want to buy a TV and use TV as the search term, you will get many irrelevant pages. If you add the word buy, the results will be narrowed but there will also be a lot of advertisements listed. So, thinking about what it is that you want can make the search more productive. Most search engines ignore articles like "a" and "the". The Boolean operator "and" is also not needed by most search tools. So "buy TV" will work without "buy and TV". But, this post is not about search strategies, as there are great tutorials online. This is about expanding the way to obtain useful information.
The problem with the popular search engines is that they are popular and the questions asked have been asked by many people before. So, the same information shows up again and again along with the sites that have paid for ranking them at the top. But this is not always true as the top page may be the site with the most links to it. But there is an alternative to the "most popular search engines".
There are literally thousands of search engines and databases and some are very specialized. For example, if you have an interest in mushrooms you can search for "mycology database" and find all sites for fungus and related information. So, use the popular search engines to find the more specialized information by searching for databases and new search engines and expand your horizons. Here is a link to one site with more search engines. Hopefully, this will whet your appetite for better information. Seek and ye shall find...
The problem with the popular search engines is that they are popular and the questions asked have been asked by many people before. So, the same information shows up again and again along with the sites that have paid for ranking them at the top. But this is not always true as the top page may be the site with the most links to it. But there is an alternative to the "most popular search engines".
There are literally thousands of search engines and databases and some are very specialized. For example, if you have an interest in mushrooms you can search for "mycology database" and find all sites for fungus and related information. So, use the popular search engines to find the more specialized information by searching for databases and new search engines and expand your horizons. Here is a link to one site with more search engines. Hopefully, this will whet your appetite for better information. Seek and ye shall find...
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