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October 05, 2007
Google/Yahoo! Groups
Yahoo! Groups
Searching “Detroit Red Wings” (not in quotes) on Yahoo! Groups, I seemed to find only some rather poorly constructed and small fan pages. Some were for specific players while others were for “ALL Detroiters” interested in politics. Clearly, my first search didn’t go to well.
I tried focusing my search by putting Red Wings in quotes. Doing so actually made my search even worse. Apparently, the Yahoo! Groups search isn’t afforded the same tools as the normal Yahoo! search. This search gave me the same Detroiters politics group, as well as DavesDirtyRatBastardsHuntingClub at #2! The first actual Red Wing related find in this query is the same Kris Draper group from the first search.
All in all, I wasn’t impressed with the Yahoo! Groups search and wouldn’t use it to find any kind of information. Ever.
Google Groups
Maybe I’m just partial to using Google, but I was relieved to visit the Google Groups page after my experience at Yahoo! I don’t know how they do it, but somehow most every time I use something with the name Google on it I feel satisfied.
Google allows you to either “search groups” or “search for a group.” Naturally, I tried them both using my search for Detroit Red Wings. Google gave me 5 different groups related to the Red Wings. Right off the bat, this search is a lot slicker than Yahoo!’s. However, the rest of the results in this search don’t seem to be very useful. There are a few advertising some memorabilia for sale, and then a preview of a December 22, 2003 game against the St.Louis Blues.
I moved back and used the “search for a group.” Somehow, it gave me a bunch of irrelevant groups (from obituaries to “pinball-related issues) and didn’t include the more relevant groups that it found in the first search. Searching for Red Wings in quotes produced nothing different.
Google Groups did work better than Yahoo! Groups, but neither returned very important information or sources. Maybe its just that I searched for sports, but they seem to just find very small (and irrelevant) sources. I won’t be using these searches for anything more than entertainment in the future.
Posted by stevenwr at October 5, 2007 04:57 PM