Another fruitful lesson. I've learn metacrawler and google directory. I've not even heard of them before lesson on wednesday , really ashamed of myself .
Starting with Metacrawler linking to the process of crawling or spidering (obviously not related to this )
Function
When a search is submitted to a meta-search engine, the meta-search engine will then relay the query to multiple regular search engines, such as Yahoo search or Google. The meta-search engine then aggregates and filters the results using it's own filtering algorithms. This method can theoretically provide a wider range of results
It' really an awesome search engine as it gives results from all the famous search engiine like google , bing and yahoo! etc.
Notice that every link that metacrawler gave , they will write the search engine name that provides it and that is the best part as it gathers the best returns from google,yahool,bing etc and give it to you. It's like giving you all the good stuff. However as we can see metacrawler only provides returns for only up to two pages for my search. If i google my search, i would probably receive thousands of returns but for metacrawler i've only receive a few pages of returns. The bad thing about this is the lack of returns or informations, while the good part is that is takes away those (what the search engine thinks as )useless sites and give you the important ones.
Google Directory.
The way it function is like looking at the world map. If you want to look for hollywood on the map, you have to look for North America - United States - Florida - hollywood. It's like zooming in from human to cells.
It's really useful if for example I want to read something about computers
Step 1 - i will chose computers from the categories
step 2 - look through the list , i have chosen history.
step 3- look through the list, at the bottom of the picture, google directory will display history of computers
step 4 - Under history i can either look in further on linux , mac os , unix and windows , or read about operating system of computers.
step 5 - i've chosen microsoft windows history which will display all the relevant sites under microsoft windows history.
To choose which search engine, the MetaCrawler or Google Directory depends on individuals. I would prefer MetaCrawler over Google Directory when i'm researching about something as it gives me informations in the shortest time and more relavant sites from different search engines as compared to google directory.
As for google directory, i would use it when i feel like reading a topic, so that i can narrow it down .
