Judging from the number of my friends that have Excite e-mail addresses, Excite's search engine (www.excite.com) must be a very popular one. The homepage has a very plain design, but sometimes great gifts come in brown packages.
The site is event driven so, last time I looked at it, it was full of the mid-February joys of romance. But a reliable search engine, not suggestions for lovestruck gifts, is what we are looking for. Using the same search term, "Irish universities", as in the past yields 617,590 results. The very first link it offers is to the Higher Education Authority, which is more to the point than most other engines' first suggestion.
The second suggested link, though, is to Indiana's Notre Dame University. This is because its American football team is known as "The Fighting Irish", but it shows up the vagaries of Excite's system for logging relevant links. Three of the rest of the top-10 links relate to Trinity College - which either points to good work by the www people in TCD, or lazy logging by Excite. The rest of the top 10 are English college sites, except for a bizarre, and very funny, Irish Universities Athletics Championships picture gallery.
Hotbot's (www.hotbot.com) engine is more advanced than most in that it allows you to refine your search in various ways to help produce more accurate results. You can specify that the links it throws up have to include an image, MP3 music clip, video or even Javascript. You can also limit the returns to 10, 25, 50 or 100 and get matches in Boolean phrase in nine languages from any time between the last week and two years ago.
Using the same search phrase, and the pre-set parameters, the first link offered leads to a list of universities in Britain and Ireland. One search engine leading to another seems a little too much navel-gazing, especially when the only Irish links this subsequently leads to are TCD and UCD.
Its second link goes directly to DCU's homepage, but the third links to a Television History project which seems to have no relevance to Irish Universities whatsoever. Hotbot is a good search engine if you can use the parameters to find exactly what you need, but maybe not for the casual browser.
The UK Plus (www.ukplus. com) homepage has separate links to Scotland, Ireland and Wales "Plus". Going to the Irish one you are met with the cheery greeting of "We've picked these for you". The first four web links it picks are the Department of the Taoiseach, The Irish Times (with a wrong link), Guinness and the Bank of Ireland - which may give foreigners the misguided impression that we are obsessed with politics, news, alcohol and money.
Using the "Irish Universities" search term leads to a top 10 that includes the Northern Ireland Department of Education, UCC and a lot of irrelevant business and tourism sites. This is not worth visiting unless you have inordinate patience.
The Financial Times website (www.ft.com) has an excellent search engine which offers you a choice of searching just locally or in what it calls a "Global Archive". This archive uses material from dozens (possibly hundreds - no figure is listed) of other newspapers and brings them into the FT site, rather than linking out to them.
The search for Irish Universities linked to recent stories from The Irish Times, the Irish Independent, the Guardian and a host of other papers. Not all of the links were entirely relevant, but the search was very fast and thorough. Using a more defined search would make this a boon for anyone doing school or college research.
Finally, Egosurf (www. egosurf.com) is no use for finding out about universities, but is great fun in letting you see how many people with the same name as you are documented somewhere on the web. It is regularly updated and rarely throws up the same results twice.
