~Meta Search Engines and Subject Directories~

Meta Search Engines :

Dogpile          

MetaCrawler              

 Ixquick Search

Above are just some of the examples of Meta search engines. I have tried exploring both the Dogpile as well as Ixquick search. Meta search engines compromises of multiple number of serach engine like Askjeeves, Google, Yahoo etc.

Below area is only a brief description on the 2 Meta search engine i explored and used on:

Firstly, Dogpile has a number of different tabs to further enhance the searching of information. They are images, news, yellow pages, white pages, video and web. In addition to that, Dogpile has an advanced search tool as well as a preference tool whereby both tools helps to filter out information in depth to get more accurate results. Dogpile has also displayed two categorized forms named 'Favourite Fetchs' and 'Quick Start', showing users the popularly searched information and a quick start to searching for respective topic groups.

In Dogpile, the results found based on my research topic was minimized to only a few result meaning that it only shows the results which are mostly closest to what i am searching for. One interesting feature about Dogpile is that it has a 'Share' button feature which allows users to share the research information through networking sites like Facebook or Twitter etc. (: This is helpful and useful for users as they are then able to share information among other users easily.
This screenshot as you can see has the 'Share' button being circled.

However, over all of these positive facts on Dogpile, it weakness is that is gathers information from multiple search engines meaning the results found might be huge and some of which might be irrelevant .


Secondly, I tried using and exploring Ixquick search a meta search engine, the results i found were quite promising too as the ones i found on Dogpile as most of which is quite useful or as accurate as i wanted it to be. But i needed to choose one meta search engine i i choose dogpile.
As seen below is a screenshot of the results found using Ixquick search.

And as for subject directories, i also managed to find a few different subject directories like About.com, Google directory, Yahoo directory, Infomine etc. I then decided to use About.com for my research.

I choose About.com because it is one of the more interesting  subject directories to use as it has various different helpful features/functions.Screenshots below, i have circled 2 different parts which helps users to further improve their search and also for users own knowledge.

 The portion which i had circled, it actually shows users the different types of topics with different articles related to the topic. and as you can see one of the is categorized as 'Have Fun' and the article on it is 'Our 5 Favourite Sitcom Aliens'.

 This other circled portion is a drop down scroll menu which is in 3 different sections, Browse our Channels, Explore our Topics and See what's Hot Now. In the first section, contains the different types/varieties of categorized groups to search on for example Entertainment, Lifestlye, Food&Drink and etc etc.

On the second  section of Explore our topics is actually different types of subject topics in alphabetical order for users to choose from; for example African History, Alcoholism, Air Travel etc etc.
Lastly, the section on See What's Hot Now compromises of the currently most visited/most popular information that is being searched.


Hope you enjoyed the Post! :)