Old memories

[Submeg]

Lol.....and his answer was?

[Teho]

I actually use Altavista as my main search engine still. I did use Google for quite some time, because the embedded search in Opera defaulted to it. But you can set it up however you want and I recently went through the list and redefined which engines should be used for what, and set it up to use Altavista again. Just for a change from Google more than preference, really.

[Puni/Void]

How's Altavista working out for you, Teho? Are you still using it, or have you changed to Google or Cuil or something else? I'm still using Google, so no changes here.

[Harrison]

I have actually been using Yahoo! a bit recently because I have found it can sometimes find things that Google doesn't. Yahoo! is an old school search engine that indexes things in a directory fashion. Whereas Google works based on association between data on a site and links point to and away from it, and I sometimes find the search results can be a bit obscure in Google because of this.

[Teho]

Yes I'm still using Altavista and am perfectly happy with it. There are occasions when something is hard to find that I also try searching with Google, but it never does any better.

Actually I often find that looking something up on Wikipedia and following the links from there is also very effective.

[Harrison]

Wikipedia is definitely very good for searching for something. I also use that a lot, plus you can really explore Wikipedia and end up in a completely different subject to the one you started with, with some great pages to read.

[Puni/Void]

Wikipedia is a great tool for sure.

Guess the times of having a huge stack of gigantic encyclopedias on the shelves are fading away. It takes a lot more effort to look something up in the books than on the Internet.

Wonder what those encyclopedia salesmen are doing these days.

As for search-engines. Anyone using Cuil, or perhaps just tried it?

[Stephen Coates]

I have been using books much more this last year, especially from the college library and I joined the public library as well recently. Plenty of useful information to be found in those.

I have never really used an encyclopedia though, other than my Britanica 98 CD and Microsoft Encarta 98 back when I didn't really use the internet much.

I also find Wikipedia very useful. I agree with what some people say about how you should always try and back it up with other sites and not use it on its own. It is however a good place to start looking for something and contains lots of information.

[J T]

I also find Wikipedia very useful. I agree with what some people say about how you should always try and back it up with other sites and not use it on its own. It is however a good place to start looking for something and contains lots of information.

Spot on there, Steve. It is quite often the first place I go to look something up or refresh my memory - and then I'll move on to something more reliable if I need to. It really is a very useful tool.

Some of the things I used to find really useful with encarta were the animations/videos with voice over. It's amazing how a decent picture or clip can help you to understand complex machinery - like internal combustion engines for example.

[Teho]

Wikipedia vs proper encyclopedias.. They both have their strength and weaknesses. Yes, proper encyclopedias may have the most reliable information, but you would never f. ex. find a detailed article about lighting farts on fire in one.