The Best Search Engines: Is FastSearch Six Times Better than Yahoo?

Dear Jeanne: Thanks for reporting on the good results from Yahoo.  I
tried the same
search and got the same 12 hits on "Campanula glomerata superba".  Then
I tried it in FASTSEARCH, which I believe to be a much better engine
than any other that I've found.  I got 90 hits, all of them on the
variety 'Superba', over six times as many hits as Yahoo.  The FastSearch
URL is:
http://alltheweb.com/

FASTSEARCH has a menu that permits you to choose "the exact same
phrase"; I used that option, and didn't need to type quotation marks.

You can find quite a bit of fairly objective evaluation of FastSearch
at:
http://listserv.surfnet.nl/scripts/wa.exe?S1=alpine-l
and even more at:
http://search.surfnet.nl/listserv/

Do you see any difference in the quality of the citations of FastSearch
as compared to those produced by the Yahoo search?  Can anyone get
better results on yet another search engine?

Harry
Harry Dewey, Beltsville, Maryland


Subject:
        garden.com and search engines
  Date:
        Sun, 19 Dec 1999 04:25:56 EST
  From:
        "Jeanne M. Hannah" <Jmh98law@AOL.COM>


Following is a suggestion for those of you who wish to search for a
specific
plant on the Internet.  Some have recommended garden.com, and others
have
stated that the choices of nurseries there are limited and also that
there
are a lot of unknowns in dealing with some of the sources.

There is another method of searching the entire Internet for a specific
plant
that you might choose.  My favorite search engine is Yahoo.

Last spring, I was searching for seven specific campanulas after
reviewing
Campanulas: A Gardener's Guide by Peter Lewis and Margaret Lynch.  This
is
the method that I used to find a resource for C. glomerata 'Superba',
for
example.

(1) Go to www.yahoo.com.

(2) In the blank for your search terms type: "campanula glomerata
superba".
The punctuation marks limit your search to that specific plant. You will
find
12 web pages for nurseries or seed companies having this plant. Without
the
quotation marks, the search is far too broad, yielding 50 web pages --
all
with the word campanula on them, but not necessarily Campanula glomerata
'Superba'.  The search engines are not interested in capital letters.

(3) Press Enter.

(4) Wait for the search engine to work, then review results.

Unfortunately, as I located the seven Campanulas I was interested in
acquiring, I found that the one nursery having most of them is located
in
British Columbia, and does not ship to the US.  However, I did find a
seed
company that had most of the seeds.  Campanula is very easy to grow from
seeds, making that a viable option.

Unfortunately, many fine nurseries do not have elaborately designed
websites.
Plant Delights is readily found, as the website is very well done.  [It
is
the metatags at the top of a  web page  that permit the search engine to
find
the page with the specified text.  Metatags are hidden inserts at the
top of
each web page, not seen by the web user, that lead a search engine to
list
that page as having the search terms. It is expensive to develop a
catalog
with metatags and shopping carts.] Thus, many other good choices might
not be
located. Unfortunately, Plant Delights, had, at the time of my search,
only
one of the seven plants I was interested in.

Searching for Arisaema candidissimum or A. fargesii, for example, using
the
above method, will not, unfortunately, take you to Ellen Hornig's
website
www.senecahill.com, as her catalog does not (at least at this point)
have
metatags.  Ellen grows the best A. candidissimum and A. fargesii I've
ever
purchased.

Thus, this method will not take you to every nursery growing a certain
plant,
but is one method to be used to search for specific plants.

Jeanne Hannah
Traverse City, Michigan
USDA Zone 5b

I hope that this information is useful to some of you in this discussion
group.
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