Search Engines 

Sacramento City College Library  
Online Internet Orientation
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Part 2 of 5

Welcome  |  Surfing vs. Research | Better Internet Research  |  The Internet  |  Search Engines  |  Subject Directories  | Website Evaluation
 Understanding URLs  |  Using Wikipedia for Research  |  Library Databases  |  Quick Review


Search Engine Differences

All search engines operate differently.  They all have different search features and the size of database for each search engine varies. 

If you look at this comparison of Search Engine Sizes and this Search Engine Features Chart, you'll see how different all of the search engines actually are.

Search Tip: If you don't find what you want with one search engine, try a different one.

Results Will Vary...

As of July 2007, a search for high blood pressure brought up the following results:  

Search Engine

Results

Altavista search engine logo.    AltaVista  33,000,000 hits
Ask.com search engine logo    Ask.com  10,110,000 hits
Google search engine logo.    Google  40,800,000 hits

As you can see, the three search engines bring up different results.  This is an example of how different these search engines are.

Do you need to look through millions of webpages to find your information?  Do you want to?


Let's look at how you can more effectively use a search engine.  Since most of you are familiar with Google, we'll use it as an example.

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Last Update January 24, 2008