Resources for Information Skills
Section contents page Introduction Choosing the right tool for the job Search engines When to use information gateways and specialist databases Google Access to the invisible web Google development How to get the best out of Google Why not always Google? Other search engines Meta-search engines Why use a directory? Overview Summary
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Why not always Google?

If Google has adequate features that we require and provides comprehensive results when we Google it. Why should we bother to use anything else?

If Google has all these features and is so comprehensive, why should I bother to use anything else?

As indicated, there are many advantages to using Google:

  • It is the largest search engine and offers significant number of facilities to search by pdf, doc, many others.
  • It uses computer robots to rank web pages, in order to judge the quality of the web page found; it counts the number of citations or backlinks to particular web pages, and weights the count by the popularity of the sites providing those links
  • Indexed over 8 billion Uniform Resources Locators (URL), which has most comprehensive collection of the useful web pages on the internet.
  • It provides a cached archive of Web pages to access even if the original page is temporarily unavailable due to some technical reasons.
  • Offers additional features such as BlogSearch, Sites, Image Search, Groups, News, etc.

On the other hand, it does have a number of weaknesses which we need to be aware of when formulating our search:

  • Google seems to have out of date index as compared to other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN/Windows Live.
  • It has limited search features; no truncation, no nesting even within advanced search.
  • It does not index the whole of each web page or pdf document, only the top 100K or so of the page, so it may miss search terms which appear lower down the page.
  • It includes link-only pages i.e. sites which only provide links to other pages and provide no added value.
  • It is inconsistent in its searching, for example it may search for plural or singular variants without telling you, or query words do not always show up on the page returned.
  • Only two pages per site will be displayed, with the second indented, so it may miss detailed information on complex web sites.