I was struggling to find the number of minutes students at a particular high school spent doing PE for another class and decided to use this assignment to see if I had better results. In the end, I never got my answer and had to change my topic, but I did get to compare results of typing in Eau Gallie High School Physical Education Minutes (not in bold) amongst 6 search engines.

From the individual search engines Bing, Google, and Yahoo, as well as the meta search engines Webcrawler, Dogpile, and Zoo.com, I got some similarities and differences. All six returned the school’s home page on edline.net as the first result.

Two of each type of search engine returned the school’s athletics page on edline.net as the 2nd result, and the other 2 had it as the third.

Now, here is where things got a little more interesting. The reason I was searching this particular school was to learn more about teacher Barbara Berry’s physical education program. The original webpage that I found her on came up next on four out of the six search engines. On Google, she was fifth to appear, and on Webcrawler, second!

Mapquest’s link to the school was popular for the fourth and fifth spots, but Google was the only engine to return an article from Shape.org about Barbara Berry. Similarly, Webcrawler was alone in producing a Pakistani news page about Eau Gallie’s recent football win. Less eventful, Yahoo returned a yellowpages.com link to the school.

In summary, it seems the most relevant information appeared in results 1-3 on all six search engines. Google returned something relevant the others did not. The other five all returned a generic directory-type link within the first five results. Google wins again.