Mamma I'm Coming Home...Actually I'm Moving Out!
Written: Dec 26 '00
| Site Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Customer Service: |
|
|
| Download Speed of Results: |
 |
|
| Advanced Search Features: |
 |
|
| Accuracy of Search Results: |
|
|
| Number of Dead Links: |
|
|
| Multimedia Search: |
|
|
|
| Full Review |
Mamma.com is first Canadian-owned search engine. That's just about the only thing that sets this metasearch site apart. As I wrote in an earlier review, there are a few different ways to run a search site.
The first way, is to hire human beings to arrange all the site on the Internet into categories. This is called the directory approach, and it's a viable way to find real high level information fast. More importantly, it's arranged in a way that novices can interact with the information easily.
The second way is to write a program or 'bot' to check individual web pages for similarities with information that a user has typed into your site. Hotbot employs this strategy.
The third way -- and Mamma.com is an example of this is to write a program that interacts with all the other search bots. This should give the user great search results and save you time -- it's going to all the other search sites for you in one fell swoop.
Let's see if this is true.
When the user arrives at Mamma, they see a fairly simple interface. The search box is prominently displayed. To search the web, leave the buttons underneath the search box alone.
We'll use a search for former Toronto Blue Jay "Willie Upshaw" and MLB Player Union exec as an example. The information contained in the brackets is the engine that returns the result.
The first link returned is a dud. It's a personal homepage at Angelfire that contains no pertinent information.
[ ask jeeves ] http://www.angelfire.com/ca/baseballMysfit/
The second link is good. It's the Willie Upshaw profile at The Baseball Online Library from CBS SportsLine ...
[ MSN ] http://register.sportsline.com/u/baseball/bol/ballplayers/U/Upsha
The third link also hits. It contains the year by year stats for Upshaw throughout his career.
[ Infoseek, Lycos, MSN ] http://www.baseball-reference.com/u/upshawi01.shtml
The fourth link is completely wrong.
So you can see that even though you get multiple search engine results, they are not all good.
If you are shopping, you can click the iconized buttons on the right side of the screen to be transferred to a paid partner of Mamma -- these are advertising deals. You can also use the Auctions or Shopping tabs.
If you want to search for graphic and MPGs, you'll need to click the radio buttons underneath the search box. These use other engines to find the files, so I would recommend going to Hotbot or Lycos to use their multimedia search functionality directly.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
bhweb22
|
 - Top 500 |
|
Member: Brian H
Location: Northeast
Reviews written: 297
Trusted by: 107 members
About Me:
I'm an Internet GEEK.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2008 Shopping.com, Inc.