Search engine comparisons: Library 2.0 Activity #21

I decided to settle on Mooter, Exalead and Clusty as my search engines to use in my experiment. I was trying to remember a case I had looked for earlier, involving the courtroom shooting of an accused child murderer by the victim's mother in a German courtroom. I finally found it after I had tried just looking for "accused child murder shot by victim's mother in German courtroom" in Google. It was about the twentieth result, and was actually about a play on the subject, currently being performed in Canada. I learned the shooting victim's name was Klaus Grabowski and the shooter's name was Marianne Bachmeier. I typed in "Grabowski Bachmeier" in Mooter, Exalead and Clusty, to simplify the comparison of results. Clusty and Exalead displayed results like Google. All three cited Wikipedia articles, but not in the different order. I liked the graphical representation of results in Mooter, though there are clearly some language-recognition issues. Mooter clusters results under "der", "die", and "den", which are indicative articles, too common in German to be useful headings. Results cluster under separate surnames, "Mutter" (for "mother") and "movie" were a bit more useful. I learned from the last cluster heading that a movie had been made about the subject. I liked the thumbnails of web pages, along with the "preview" feature, in Exalead. Clusty's results clusters were less relevant than Mooter's, even totally off the subject. The fourth result was an ad for one of those paid personal data search services (in other words, completely irrelevant). I came away deciding that I need to try out Mooter, Exalead and other search engines, and not depend so much upon Google for my research. I've felt that way actually for years, but haven't implemented it. The main thing to always keep in mind is that you never really see all that the Internet has to say about your particular topic, only what the search engine's algorithm can retrieve. And what it retrieves may still not be relevant. I would like to look at engines which score the results. It also comes down with how well the search is formulated, utilizing syntax and codes peculiar to each search engine. Gravee, by the way, seemed to freeze up in Firefox when I used it. I don't think I'll bother with that one again. I'm willing to try Clusty some more, but will be more skeptical of its results.