Google, AOL, Yahoo, Altavista or AskJeeves. Most students probably couldn’t care less about the differences between Internet search engines.

A search engine is a search engine is a search engine, right?

Maybe in some cases, but when students need to get information for a research project and all that comes up is massive amounts of pornography, they should probably think about using a different search engine.

For any type of research, students should first take advantage of the many sources offered on the De Anza College Library Web site. Under the heading “Search Engines and Information Portals,” are various reference indexes and recommended search engines.

Specifically recommended by De Anza Librarian Pauline Yeckley is the Librarians’ Index to the Internet, a directory and search engine comprised only of Web sites reviewed by librarians.

For research related to a specific country, students can use the link entitled, “Portals to the World,” where they can click on a country and find links pertaining to the country’s culture, government, history, and more.

“All of the sites are informational, so students don’t have to sift through a lot of the commercial sites that they might find at Yahoo or Google,” said Yeckley.

For research related to a specific country, students can use the link “Portals to the World,” where they can click on a country and find links pertaining to the country’s culture, government, history, and more.

Students can also find newspaper, journal and magazine articles through the library Web site. De Anza subscribes to reference indexes such as Ebscohost, Proquest and Infotrac for magazine articles, and to Newsbank and Associated Press Newswire for up-to-date as well as past news stories. Students can obtain passwords for these databases from the library reference desk.

For statistical information, students can click on the link “Business Web Sites,” and go to “RAND California.”

“It’s nice because they let you compare [the California statistics] with the statistics of other cities, the state, the country and even the world,” said Yeckley.

For more commercial based searching, Yeckley and George Hein, coordinator of Computer Labs in the Language Arts Division, recommend Google and AltaVista. Through Google, students can search general Web sites as well as images or news stories.

“You can get news stories published five seconds ago,” said Hein. “AltaVista lets you search for audio and video files. More interesting, though, is their translation feature. Let’s say I find a Web page that’s in a language other than English. AltaVista can translate the whole page into a different language.”

What makes one search engine better than another is partly based on the technical methods a search engine relies upon.

“All search engines have spiders that crawl around the Internet scooping up Web sites to put in their databases. Then, when you search, they find Web sites from their database based on your keywords,” said Hein. “The limitation is based on how much spidering they’ve done and how complete their database is.”

The usefulness of a search engine is also based on the order the pages are listed.

“People expect that when they type something in, the first page will contain what they’re looking for. [It’s] an enormous challenge to get the most relevant information on the top,” said Hein.

There are many factors involved in ranking Web pages, including how often a site is visited, updated and how many times the keyword appears on the page.

“Google, in particular, also counts how many other sites point to that site, and then ranks it accordingly,” said Hein.

Hein encourages students to be aware of the possibility of bias in using just one search engine.

“There are many factors that determine what comes up as the first 10 sites. It may or may not be inclusive of all views, and that may reflect some bias. When Google does its popularity contest, unpopular views will be at the bottom of the list, where most people don’t look.”

“Don’t waste your time with any of the new [search engines]. AskJeeves is useless and AOL is a piece of junk,” said student and Internet enthusiast David Chen. “Just stick to Yahoo and Google and the library’s links and you should find everything you need.”