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Search Engine Update

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2008

Valerie Stevenson
Affiliation:
At the BIALL conference in Glasgow, 1999, Valerie Stevenson, Faculty Information Consultant, Social Sciences and Law, University of Aberdeen, gave a paper on using search engines which was published as ‘When to Excite and when to Yahoo! Evaluating the Internet Search Engines’ in The Law Librarian, Volume 31, No. 3, September 1999. This article outlines the main changes which have taken place since then. Much of the information here formed the basis of her presentation in one of the parallel sessions at the Cork annual study conference.

Extract

Looking back to 1999, there were a number of search engines which performed equally well. I recommended defining the search strategy very carefully, using Boolean logic and field search techniques, and always running the search in more than one search engine. Numerous articles and Web columns comparing the performance of different search engines came to different conclusions on the ‘best’ search engines. Over the last year, however, all the speakers at conferences and seminars I have attended have recommended Google as their preferred tool for locating all kinds of information on the Web. I confess that I have now abandoned most of my carefully worked out search strategies and comparison tests, and use Google for most of my own Web searches.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 2001

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References

References and URLs

Google a go-go, Mieszkowski, Katherine, Salon.com, 21 June 2001, http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/21/google_henziger/index.htmlGoogle Scholar
The Great Portal Payoff, Rozanski, Horacio D. and Bollman, Gerry, (22 February) 2001, http://www.strategy-business.com/enews/ and follow the linkGoogle Scholar
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