specialized search engines

[Guest wickaph]

what do you think of specialized and corpus-specific search engines? do you think they're useful and worth using?

[blike]

I've never seen one, I don't even know what it is. Any examples?

[Guest wickaph]

i think it's an engine focused on a certain subject only, unlike google, yahoo, etc.

i haven't seen one yet:confused:

[Sayonara]

The quality of such a search engine will depend on three things:

 

(1) The quality of the structure of any databases it is searching through - a good DB structure is essential to any web-based application,

 

(2) The quality of the actual script that runs the search - a little thought goes a long way here (a search engine is basically an interface for building semi-custom queries to be run on a database table),

 

(3) The quality of the instructions given and the competence of the user in following them.