the wonder wheel of google would be good to refine a search and to generate new search terms. the timeline was intriguing but maybe should be used with care as interest in an event (and thus web activity) might bear little relation to when the event happened. Even limiting a search seams to bring up amany unwanted hits.
I used the search string "mile a minute" weed to compare the search engines. I belive that there may be several plants with this common name and was interested to find the proper botanical name for them. Bing produced the most hits 93,000. Bing and Google both anticipated my search and bought up alternative ending to the search string. Google and Yahoo produced 22,800 and 20,400 hits respectively and Exalead only 2,434. Google, Bing and Exalead produced Wikipedia as the first entry. All featured gov. and edu. sites and images early in the result page. They were all heavily U.S. based. Early entries informed me that Persicania perfoliata was once known as Polygonum perfoliatum, many of the entries on Exalead used only the old name indicating older sites. Only Yahoo gave me an alternative weed Mikania micantha which is troublesome on Pacific Islands. Based on this Yahoo is my prefered search engine, but I will probably still continue to use google as well.
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