Reflections: Meta Search Engine and Subject Directory

Today, I was introduced to 2 new search facilities, meta search engine and subject directory. This was a whole new experience for me as I had never used them before. I chose MetaCrawler as meta search engine and Google Directory as subject directory.

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For MetaCrawler, I found out that the homepage interface was quite clean and easy to use. All the search functions and tabs are clearly stated and properly arranged. The special function of this website is the Popular Searches tab, whereby user can just clicked on the most popular keywords being searched. This function is significant different because it was absent in Google Search and other search engines. From the search results on MetaCrawler, I found that the search results is not that useful for my topic. Other than that, the main drawback of MetaCrawler is the ads on the search results . From the search page, about half of the results was purely advertisements found on Google, Yahoo! And Bing. The results was quite disappointing. Another weakness of MetaCrawler is the limited amount of text on search bar. Actually I wanted to use Boolean Operators method for this search engine in order to compare the results retrieved more effectively. But due to the facts that there are text input limit, I have no choice but to use the research topic without any brackets and Boolean Operators.

On the other hand, the Google Directory was the new database that I found besides Google search engine. I realised that in the homepage of Google Directory, there are this extra colum below the search bar that shows different categories and topics. I think this feature is very nice because users and readers can just click on their desired category In one click or perform more precise searches within that category. Besides the search bar and the category column, there is a small green column at the bottom of the page. Web owners can submit their webpage to Google Directory in order to be featured in here. There are other function such as becoming an editor of Google Directory and learn more about the open directory project. On the search results, the results that matched the keywords was quite little and below hundreds. In my cases, most of the results are from official organisation and government related agencies.

As a conclusion, I think meta search engine can gives users more perception or information that cannot be found by using single search engine. Meta search engine can helps to generate more pages or results from different search engine and therefore contribute more information in research process. Whereby subject directory like Google Directory is for users who wants to look for exact information and statistics data. This is because through searches in Google Directory, I found that most of the websites are official organisation and government-related agencies, which means the original source of information.