Technology Tools Week 2

Again, this week's class offered up some interesting new technologies. The biggest thing for me, and I would bet for others, is using a different search engine. Most of us probably use one search engine for everything, usually Google. I was not aware that there were so many different search engines out there. While I have used many search engines like Lycos, Google, WebCrawler, Yahoo, and Bing, I didn't know about the others. A quick look in Wikipedia under the term search engine listed all known search engines by their creation date. Very interesting list.

After researching that list for a while, I chose to try out the engine called Cuil (pronounced cool). I chose it mainly because its name interested me. While it is a good search engine and its results format is different than Google, it is not as thorough as Google. I may try some meta-search engines like Dogpile later this week. If it can really search many different search engines and get better results, that is great.

As for the online word processing services, I was already pretty familiar with those services. There were really not any surprises in this area. I am now excited that I have an entire suite of online services. Between Google Docs and some of the others we learned about I now have presentation, word, graphic, and spreadsheet services available to me. While they are not as advanced as something like Microsoft Office, they work for me. I am a basic user, not an advanced one. For the most part, these services will work fine for me and I am looking forward to sharing this information with my teachers.