Comparison of different Search Engines

I have spent bits of today looking at each of the engines and using the same keywords 'second life education'. It has been rather interesting - nothing came up under Millenium - hadn't really expected anything as it is still so new. Perhaps our Education Liaison librarian should see if there is anything out there - especially as some of the US Universities are starting to use this technology to run their courses eg mock trials etc in Law.

Del.icio.us, Connotea and Citulike are all tagged by users with the last two appearing to have fewer hits, but appear to be more scientific or academic in nature. Connotea only had 3 hits in the last 3 months.

The keyworded engines had different hit rates or methods of operandum - Google had 189 million results and was quite eclectic with PDFs also found; Dogpile initially only came up with 66 hits and immediately showed results from Flikr and Del.icio.us; Zuula had the different search engines tabbed along the top and meant that though it searched all engines simultaneously - they were shown in isolation, thus the Google tab showed 191 million, the second tab for Yahoo showed 204 million etc; and finally Kartoo - firstly you could choose whether to just search UK or world wide - this resulted (WW) in 21 million hits with each page only showing approx 14 to 15 visually with their links.

Interesting exercise - would it make people change to another search engine - don't know. I used to use dogpile over 10 years ago - got out of the habit. Am using Google at the moment - isn't everyone? Only because I'm really into Igoogle to organize my information and communications.