Hi all,
I thought it worth repeating my previous post about the excellent Russian search engine called Yandex. It is one of the few general purpose search tools that genuinely rivals google. For scientific & engineering and technical information, it provides a unique and valuable set of search results!
cheers, Robert
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Previous Post:
You will probably be familiar with the problems with Google's search algorithm when you ask it to find "in depth" (science type) information, for instance information about a particular NGC object.
Typically, you get:
- frequently referenced sites coming up ( most of which have trivial information)
- search results including NGC objects other than the one you have searched for
- observing lists & descriptions made by amateur astronomers
- lots of sites with only basic information
I have recently found a Russian search engine called Yandex:
http://www.yandex.com
that has very good capabilities when you ask it to search for information about a specific astronomical object, and which has very good search capabilities for scientific and technical information.
I have only started to test this engine in detail, but when I put inverted commas around the astronomical object name, e.g "NGC 3115", this engine ONLY gets results about the astronomical object in question, and good results at that.
Another important thing Yandex lets you do is to click at the bottom of the page, which will sort the search results by "date", rather than by "relevance"
This is an excellent idea, because
much of what a search engine thinks is relevant about an NGC object is
usually fairly useless for getting very detailed information about an object. Clicking to get
date order, for the results, weeds out a lot of the amateur observing notes, popular-level sites, and other distracters, and finds a lot of the more technical-level information. (the "date order search" finds a lot of science results)
Cheers,
Mad bad galaxy man
I wouldn't say "date order" is always superior to "order results by relevance", but it gives a different perspective from the results of other search engines.
Yandex is not exactly "better" than google, but it is one of the few search engines that gives a different but very valuable set of results.
Yandex isn't too clever for its own good (google's "intelligence" seems to give results that are mainly useful for "Joe Average"!!)
