Gene Patterson

Assignment #2

          The two topics I chose to research for this assignment were to find a good web hosting company and to find a good place to find a new video card for my computer since that is something I plan to purchase in the near future.  The topic for web hosting companies is related to my major since it is directly related to this class and the topic on searching for a video card is a topic that I have been meaning to research for a while and haven't had the right motivation.  The search engines I used to research these two topics were snap.com, iwon.com, and turtlefind.com.        The first search I performed was the search for a web hosting company.  Of the three companies I tried the best would have to be snap.com. While it returned almost the same list of sites as Iwon.com, it was very easy to operate and seemed to operate and load much smoother.  Turtlefind.com on the other hand gave a list of a few very unrelated sites such as domain name registration and search engine submission and was not very impressive at all.
    The second search I performed was the search for a sound card. I was not looking for a particular model, but was rather just shopping around.  All three of the engines I used returned very similar results to the point that you would think they were just about the same one. All of the search engines returned several very useful sites.  Two which I am already familiar with were Ebay.com and Ubid.com.  They also returned several comparison sites that compare the features and prices of a wide range of products including of coarse sound cards.  I would still have to rank snap.com as the best judged not on content, but since they all had practically the same results, but because once again it loaded much faster and was easier to get around on.
    Based on the experience of these two searches I would have to say that I wouldn't use turtlefind.com to find anything because the results you get are not very useful. While Iwon.com had decent content I didn't like having to sign in, and the site was hard to navigate.  Snap.com had the best of both worlds, easy to navigate and use, while having the content I was looking for.