Keeping up with search engines

It's not easy. They are forever getting married and divorced, and otherwise morphing into new and different creatures. I'm fascinated by what's come out of the Teoma and Ask.com (formerly AskJeeves) merger. I tried a couple of searches students have done here recently. Take a look at the results for a search on earthquakes. Right at the top -- information on recent earthquake activity and a box for entering other locations! And check out what happens when you pass your cursor over the cute binocular icon next to each citation. Very cool indeed (though perhaps not quite as useful as the "sneak-a-peek" feature in Wisenut, which opens a little browser window right within the search results page).

The results for a search on author Kurt Vonnegut are also interesting. There's his photo right at the top, with links to his official site and reference-type sources (yay, Internet Public Library!). It is sort of odd that one of the suggested ways to narrow your search is to click on Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Death, which makes it sound as if he's dead (which he's not). This high-level link I attribute to the search engine picking up on the many times the words "dead" or "death" appear in relation to Vonnegut's works. But as to the overall goodness of the new Ask.com, I am sure that some of the credit goes to their wise decision to appoint real live librarian Gary Price as their Director of Online Information Resources. He's also the compiler and editor of the trusty ResourceShelf.