This report comes from the VIP-L list in Australia

Alan Cantor
Cantor + Associates Inc.
Workplace Accommodation Consultants
[log in to unmask]
www.interlog.com/~acantor

Forwarded message:

This message is not based on a review of a wide range of search engines, and
a comparison of their features.

However, it is based on having exclusively changed over to, and intensively
using www.google.com for all my web searching needs.

People using other search engines they find particularly good (or bad) may
wish to send their own posts to vip-l, particularly if they find things in
their preferred engine that help blind and vision impaired people search the
web.

In my experience, Google found at

www.google.com

is the best search engine available online.

It clearly tells you if search results are commercial or not, and only
presents a maximum of one or two.

It can be configured to return up to 100 results on a single page, - much
nicer than having to continually go to new pages every ten or so results.

It searches for pages containing *all* the words you enter, so the results
are *much* more likely to be what you are looking for. Many other engines
seem to match based on a couple of words, and the most relevant results are
usually not easily found.

It also only shows the first few results from a single page, but allows you
to get all the results from that page if you want them.

I also find the google page summaries to be short but informative.

The thing I really like about google is that it caches copies of all the
pages it indexes - this means that you don't keep getting those errors about
pages not being available  etc. You can of course always go directly to the
link for the actual page that was found, but if its no longer a valid link,
then you can go to a link containing google's own copy of that page, stored
during indexing.

Now, as discussed below, you can now also get to a link containing any text
extracted from PDF files that the google search engine knows about.

You can customise it so that search results you select are opened in a new
window, allowing you to keep the google page open for reference.

All-in-all for me, its the best tool on the web, and I never even bother
using web-ferrit any more, even though I registered it.

Following are more details on the PDF conversion facility now built into
google.

Taken from:

http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/new.shtml

Google Indexes PDF Files

   Jan. 31, 2001. In a major break with the tradition of other search
   engines, Google has begun indexing the full text of Adobe Portable
   Document Format (PDF) files. These are identified in Google search
   results with a [PDF] designation at the front. Instead of a cached
   copy of the full PDF file, Google offers a text version. Google does
   not offer a way to search only their indexed PDF files, but just
   adding PDF as an extra search term can often bring up some results.
   Try laser pdf to see an example of the documents that may now be
   found.

   According to Chris Sherman's report, Google has already indexed 13
   million PDF files. Full implementation on all Google's search clusters
   is not due until Feb. 5, so you may or may not find any PDF files in
   your results (and for the search above) until that time. Either way,
   this is a significant addition to their already large Web database,
   and it means that Google may well find even more documents not
   available from other search engines.

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