Things 21 & 22

Looking at the homepages of the main search engines, there doesn't seem to be much between them. They have similar options i.e images etc (although Ask does have fewer) and also all have a UK only option. Ask and Google do seem the only two to have an, or a least an obvious, advanced search option. I do find Yahoo too cluttered and prefer the cleaner pages of the others. I was intrigued by the visual search offered by Bing but unfortunately I am not sure if it would be useful unless I was trying to put a face to a celebrity name. I was however not disappointed by Ask's 'Dress up Jeeves':

Results wise, for the search I did, Yahoo, Ask and Google retrieved very similar results but Bing missed the key one I was looking for (I replicated a search I had done for real recently). I do have a bit of an aversion to Bing, sometimes my searches seem to default to this engine for no reason and the results never seem to be what I am looking for! I was sad to see that Ask has ads at the top and it is quite hard to differentiate them.

All in all, I don't think there was anything worth changing from Google.

A search for my old name produced 243 results on Google vs. 24 for Google on Zuula. Admittedly Zuula did retrieve most of the results that actually related to me but missed one result that had been a pleasant surprise and an important find (second author on a paper from research I did as a vacation project at uni!). One thing I found with meta searches is not all search engines support the same functions. For example, I put my name in quotations to narrow the search and this meant that a couple of the search engines yielded no results with the quotation marks given as a possibility.

Cool Extra Thing

I must admit I have been doing the 'A Google a Day' this week, as a little challenge to myself and will probably continue to do so out of curiosity.