Google.com is Best

Google

Google (google.com) is one of the best search engines on the web. It is just like any other search engine at first sight but it is vastly superior to any one I have ever seen.

Advantages

- Fast
It is lightning fast, in only a few seconds, it can scan through millions of web pages.
I tested this by searching for ebay and it took under 5 seconds to display results. This is taken for granted nowadays, however, just think of it, possibly a billion web pages searched in less than 1 second. According to the blurb, Google has displayed 874,000 results in 0.21 seconds. The fastest search I have got was 0.08 seconds.

- Web Pages on the search engine
This brings me onto my next point, 874,000 web pages with ebay in their name or description. That is mind-boggling, they must have left hardly any out. According to the little sentence at the bottom on the front page, they search 1,610,476,000 web pages every time (with exceptions.)

- Customisation
Another smooth transition between points. You may not have the time to trawl through 874,000 web pages looking for ebay so you can customise your search to block certain ‘things’ and give preference to others. Just click on advanced search and there you go: you can search for words, phrases, web pages without words or phrases and so on. But it does get better, set it to English or German and get only web pages in that language. No more staring at a Japanese site with your dictionary! The next option allows you to search for different file types.

You can also search for web pages added within the last 6 months or 3 months if you are looking for information, for example, on the new Ford Mondeo or the FA Cup. Once you have searched once, you can then make it so you don’t get results from a particular domain. E.g. maybe you don’t want to see hundreds of results from amazon if you want to buy a cooker. The last feature is quite handy for webmasters, it allows you to search for pages which have links to a particular page. I like this as you can search for pages that link to a website about a hobby of yours, e.g. belfastgiants.com.

- Accuracy
When I searched for ebay, the FIRST result was ebay.com. This is good as it can save you a lot of time. Accuracy with search engines is very dependent on the webmasters’ descriptions but Google does well.

- I’m Feeling Luck
No, not really, but Google has a nice feature whereas you can type in your search words and press the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button, you will be then delivered straight to the first web page returned from the search.

- Images Search
Does exactly what it says on the tin really, search for images. This is a handy alternative for clipart, but not as reliable as the normal search; this is due to the fact many pictures are called pic1 etc… However, it can yield good results, and new websites you have not heard off before.

- Groups
Ten groups of groups (sorry): alt, news, biz, rec, comp, humanities, soc, misc and talk. A nice little description of each is available on the site by clicking on the groups tab.

- Directory
The directory is a section where all the websites are listed by category. I have listed the categories below.

Arts
Business
Computers
Games
Health
Home
Kids and Teens
News
Recreation
Reference
Regional
Science
Shopping
Society
Sports
Worlds

These are pretty normal for a directory, the directory is nothing special but is good. Navigation is easy.



Disadvantages

- Advertising
If you search for certain phrases such as online shopping, you get a coloured box as the first result, this is a sponsored link, that companies pay for to get higher in the search results. This may be slightly distorting the results, however, they are clearly marked and do not seem to slow down the searching.



Well, as you can plainly see, there are way more advantages than disadvantages. To summarise, it is fast and customisable. Well worth a look for anyone who doesn’t already use it.