Re: Search engines
- To:
- Subject: Re: Search engines
- From: M* T*
- Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 03:31:24 -0500
Well, Val, I have spent the past couple of years intensively searching the
web for specific plant information, including who sells what.
So far, I have not found any search engine that will return a list of
really relevant, current (not dead) hits without a lot of extraneous stuff,
no matter how you phrase the query.
In the past few months, I've been using the freeware webferret, which
resides on my computer and searches the major search engines. It's max is
500 hits. It is fast and usually provides me with what I'm looking for -
still gives a lot of stuff I can't use plus the usual quota of 404 not
founds. But it is speedy and you can sort hits alphabetically by page
name,which helps if you've used a specific plant name as the keyword. I've
used PlantAmerica's metacrawler search and it's OK, but I generally get
more results from webferret. If you're interested in webferret, here's
the URL to their site:
http://www.ferretsoft.com/netferret/index.html
The only way, so far, that I've been able to locate a nursery carrying a
specific plant is to maintain a good set of bookmarks for online nurseries
and physically go to each site and check it. Online nurseries who maintain
alphabetical quick lists of their plants are high on my list because it
saves so much time in searching! They do, however, have a habit of
updating their catalogs every year and making the previous link
worthless...but you can always get to their homepage by backtracking the
URL - if they are still viable - and update your bookmark.
One of the problems is that a lot of online nurseries have not entered
their pages in the search engines, so their sites are not indexed and don't
come up in searches. Most particularly, each individual plant is not used
as a keyword for those search engines that use META tags (and only a few
use them). Another problem is that the major search engines are so busy
being portals that they are way behind in indexing pages and they are
starting to rank hits not by actual relevance to the query, but by whether
the site has a deal with them or whether it has a lot of external links or
whether others have selected it from other hit lists - in other words, they
are becoming relatively useless where searches for really specific
information is concerned in arcane topics like horticulture...now, if you
want sex or the latest hit recordings or stock information.....
If someone could come up with software that would search my bookmarks only,
I'd get it in a flash! Save one whale of a lot of time.
Marge Talt, zone 7 Maryland
mtalt@clark.net
Editor: Gardening in Shade
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> Valerie Lowery@ZEON
> 03/31/99 07:47 AM
>
> Was there a post some time ago on a good plant finder for the Internet?
I
> was hoping that there was some type of way to try to find a particular
> plant that was available for sale. I don't know how to phrase the search
> inquiry to find what I'm looking for without pulling up a whole lot of
> scientific articles and other unrelated stuff. All I want is to find
what
> nursery I can buy a particular plant from.
>
> Anyone know of a good site or search engine that serves this purpose?
>
> Val in KY
> zone 6a
>
>
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