Web 2.0 awards

I looked at both the Web 2.0 awards and the Webaware awards, and ended up choosing a site from the Webaware awards.

I had actually heard of the site www.answers.com before but had never really take the time to explore and use it.

To test out the site, I tried a couple of searches, and then browsed the sites features for awhile. The first search I tried was based on an actual reference question--a patron wanted to know more about the guns used on the Louis and Clark expedition. For this search, the search engine performed pretty much the same as Google, but did return different results. The next search I tried was for the book we are doing for next month's book club A Thousand Splendid Suns for this search, I really like the way the information was aggregated and visually displayed from a variety of sources. It grabbed the article from Wikepedia, and displayed an attractive sidebar, showing a few sites where you can buy the book. Most importantly, it told me where the information was coming from so I could refer to the original source.

The real joy of this site however was when I started to browse it. Answer.com presents subject guides on a variety of subjects, one example of which is it's diet guide http://www.answers.com/library/Diet%20Guide in which it lists a variety of diets that you can click on and then view a short summary and then sometimes an attached article from another source.

I believe that I will use this site in the future for reference work. At the very least it provides a quick alternative to the reference databases and Google.