Choosing the best searching engine

As a lot of people around the world I have always used Google as a search engine for my queries (especially for the English ones as for my Russian or Ukrainian queries sometimes I use rambler.ru or yandex.ua), but sometimes it takes a lot of time to find real scientific articles and scholar reports among all the sources the engine brings to your screen.

Some time ago I got familiar with Google Scholar. The tool is much more convenient for searching information for an academic research as it includes scientific articles and legal documents into its answer. So, I like the tool and its slogan “Stand on the shoulders of giants”. 

Today I have tried Twurdy (“Too Wordy”). The engine sorts the texts according to the Readability Level (it highlights different levels texts on your query in different colours) that give you opportunity to choose the language level you can clearly understand. This engine can be helpful for children and students with lower than intermediate English level. As you is an ESL teacher than the tool can be helpful for you in order to find articles relevant to the language level of your students while preparing tailor-made materials for the class.

Sometimes I use an engine ASK where you can ask simple (and not very simple) English questions. I should say that it seems to be not  just a search engine, but a kind of social network with its own community. This tool can be used in ESL classroom to practice asking questions and reading real authentic materials. And my today's question was “What is the best searching engine?” and I got “The 10 Best SearchEngines of 2013” list which proves that "Google may not be the best choice for all searches."

As the sphere of my interests is connected with using technologies in ESL classroom, I used three different search engines (Google Scholar, Go Comb and Noodletools) to find relevant information.

Results: Go Comb gave me a great deal of resources, but not all of them were relevant and reliable, more over it took me time to find valuable scientific articles among all the posts. As for Noodletools (according to me results in Noodle Quest I was redirected to Infomine), the result list was the most precise and valuable, but it took me a lot of time to compose a concrete query. And in Google Scholar I got an accurate list of scientific articles including resources of different libraries, it didn't take me a long time to make a query, but when I wanted to specify my question, I couldn't do it.

So, different horses for different courses… There are a lot of powerful searching machines on the Net and each of them is good for its purpose. And it's up to us to decide…