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PolyCola - A very smooth search
September 26, 2007

With a name like PolyCola, you might be surprised to discover a website built around searching as opposed to plastics and soft drinks. The real surprise with PolyCola is how it instantly empowers one of library lands classic (well, modern classic) lessons - the search engine comparison.

The PolyCola site doesn't mess around. A simple three-step interface lets you select two search engines, choose a search type, and enter a search string. The results are then displayed on a split-screen page that lets you scroll independently to instantly and cleanly compare the search results.

A quick review of searches on Google and Yahoo for "iraq war" revels some interesting findings. You can certainly see evidence of Google's link-based PageRank technology that catapults the Wikipedia entry to the top position while Yahoo's number one slot goes to BBC with Wikipedia showing up on page two in position 11. Results from Microsoft's Live engine are much closer to Google (though slower to load!) while Ask has some very odd results (pollingreport?!?) that one can only assume have been gamed to the top. PolyCola also includes AltaVista, which is a bit odd seeing as how that site uses the Yahoo engine and so should have the same results (it does in this case). You can also compare the results of a meta-search from DogPile with any single search engine. 

I see a wealth of learning opportunities here, and want to sent a great big thank you to Jeff Utecht from The Thinking Stick for sharing a wonderful teaching anecdote that introduced me to PolyCola. 

Posted by Chris Harris on September 26, 2007 | Comments (6)