Mp3 search engines vs. google
What's the best way to find information on the internet? Well, there are two general approaches: a search engine and a directory.
What's the best way to find Mp3s? Same answer: search engine and directory.
For this article, I focused on search engines. In particular I was interested in whether specialty Mp3 search engines do better than the king of search, google. (Yes, Veronica, this page is sponsored by google, but they had no input in the review).
The first two criteria concerned the quality of the interface: The first was query interface, i.e., how user-friendly was the search page. The second was the results interface, i.e., how user friendly was the results of your search.
The next two concerned how fast the query page loaded (i.e. did you have to wait long to make your search) and how quickly were the results returned. These are labled query speed and results speed.
The last set of individual criteria concerned the quality of the results. Did the engines find lots of results, accurate results and false positives. These are labled as n hits, + hits and - hits.
Finally, there is an overall score.
I looked at yahoo and dmoz's directories to find Mp3 search engines. Of the couple dozen listed most were either defunct, no longer primarily search engines or had excessive obnoxious ads or popups (which resulted in an immediate disqualification.)
The two promising candidates, mp3 search and audiophilez, were compared with google. I used the three and searched for various popular artists. In the case of google I added "mp3" to the search term.
My summative impressions are shown in the table. Google shows its well-known quality when the searching is for Mp3s. The other two were okay in general, though they both had serious flaws in the number of results category.
|
google
|
mp3 search
|
audiophilez
|
|
| query interface |
9/9
|
5/9*
|
9/9
|
| results interface |
8/9
|
7/9
|
7/9
|
| query speed |
9/9
|
8/9
|
8/9
|
| results speed |
9/9
|
8/9
|
8/9
|
| n hits |
9/9
|
8/9
|
4/9**
|
| + hits |
8/9
|
7/9
|
5/9
|
| - hits |
8/9
|
3/9
|
5/9
|
| overall |
9/9
|
6/9
|
5/9
|
google: http://google.com
mp3 search: http://mp3search.astraweb.com
audiophilez: http://www.audiophilez.com
*I would've given it 9/9, except it had blinking text.
** For example when I searched for 50 cents I got this comical reply: "Search
Results: No matches found. Did you mean to search for Snot?"