Search Engine

Over the past few months, I have recommended a couple of new and different search engines to help you find what you are looking for on the Internet. They all have their strong points and certainly suit the bill for what they promise.

One of the shortcomings of traditional search engines however, is that they function best when you think like a search engine. Best results are obtained when you insert keywords and use boolean operators, couple key works, search for exact phrases, exclude certain terms, etc.

It's a work of art when you see someone who can sit down and enter a query into a search engine and get the quotes, minuses, pluses, etc. correct the first time and get pretty good results. At the same time, it can be frustrating for the Internet searcher who doesn't use the proper characters and ends up with hundreds of thousands of useless results.

A newer engine, "Ask Jeeves" tries to avoid all of the above by turning to natural English language questions rather than obscure search queries. In the example below, I asked Jeeves to give me an answer to the question "Where can I find weather information?"

The first thing the search engine does is to let me know that there are some questions that it knows the answer to. Presumably, the programmers have parsed my question, looking for keywords and associating them with key terms that are already indexed at the site. By pulling down the menus, I can see a series of questions that Jeeves knows about and I'm all set to "Go" if any of them are actually what I want.

Ask Jeeves goes even further though. In addition to its own knowledge bank, Ask Jeeves has also sent my question to Yahoo, Excite, InfoSeek, and AltaVista. So, if Jeeves doesn't know the answer, he (?) is sure that one of the search engines might be able to give a better answer.

Ask Jeeves is a web page with personality. For those who would rather not learn the syntax of a search engine, this may well be a better solution. If you find Ask Jeeves helpful for yourself, you'll undoubtedly love Ask Jeeves for Kids!