Adam's Module 1 Answers

(a)The default web page is "Mozilla Firefox Start Page" . It appeared because I have not set another homepage.
(b) I can set another homepage under "Firefox">"Preferences">"General" on the top menu bar.

Question #2--The appearance of pages in the browser can be changed under "Firefox">"Preferences">"Content." One might change these settings because certain fonts and sizes are easier than others to process visually.
Question #3--The default search engine for Firefox is Google. A search window using Google is in the top right of the browser.
Question #4

(a) Google produced about 73,800,000 results for the first search. Based on the first ten results, about 90% of the results seem to relate in a direct way to making web pages; but, this seems to decrease slightly with subsequent pages of results.
(b) The second search produced about 30,600 results. Two examples are an Eve Online forum page and "Awards, Diplomas, and Learning to make web pages." After the first ten results, all of which offered some (though often minimal or indirect) content for learning to make web pages, the relevance of the search results appeared to diminish rapidly.

(a) Bing produced about 3.21 billion results for the first search. Similarly to Google, about 90% of the first ten to twenty results seem to offer help with learning to make web pages, but the utility and relevance seem to decline significantly thereafter.
(b) The second search produced only 357 results. Perhaps 80% of the first 15 results (diminishing thereafter) actually provided help with learning to make web pages, but most of those "helpful" sites seemed to provide minimal instructive content. Examples of results include "Writing HTML" from Maricopa Community Colleges and "How to Create a Web Page" from eHow.com.

(a) The first AltaVista search produced about 3.21 billion results, with the top ten to twenty results being largely the same as those for the first Bing search.
(b) The second AltaVista search produced only 118 results, including and "Learn to Create Web Pages Using HTML." Perhaps 50% of the first ten results seem to provide substantial help in learning to create web pages; the other results include, for instance, two Facebook pages.

(a) The first Teoma search produced about 143 million results. Based on the first two pages of search results, perhaps 50% provide any significant assistance in learning to create a web page.
(b) The second search produced 224 results. Only one of the first ten results, "Start Making a Web Page" from Direct Hit," appeared to provide any assistance (and minimally, at that) in learning to create a web page. Another search result was for a site that had been moved: "Stuff."

(a) BlowSearch does not seem to list the total number of search results. Of the first ten results, only about 30% offered content related to learning to make a web page. The rest were merchandising sites or essentially irrelevant.
(b) The second BlowSearch search was much more productive, with about 80% of the first-page results offering some sort of instruction related to creating a web page. Results included How-to-build-websites.com and an About.com article.

(a) Like BlowSearch, Kartoo does not seem to list the total number of search results. Only about 20% of the first fifteen results in the initial search seemed to provide help in creating a web page, with several of the others being sites that advertise for web-page-designing products or companies.
(b) Only perhaps 30% of the first ten results from the second search provide any actual help in learning to create a web page. Search results included "Happy Hive Honey" and a brief review from Idea Marketers of a website that may actually provide help with web-page creation.

Question #5--Based on the searches just conducted, I was rather unimpressed with the non-Google search engines. I suppose that if I were trying to produce a small or relatively small list of search results, I would use one of the non-Google search engines (with the search terms enclosed in quotations marks). The differences in the number of hits across engines stems from the different algorithms and how/where the "crawlers" look for the search terms on a given site. Some search engines may be better at distinguishing product-oriented pages from more information-oriented pages.
Question #6--Wolfram Alpha refers to itself as a "knowledge engine," which is probably appropriate. It is not a search engine in the sense of a Web-search engine because it seems to rely, at least in large part, on its own stores of data. The use of search terms and algorithms could classify it as a search engine in a broad sense.
Question #7

(a) The main difference between a regular search site and a metasite is that the latter gleans results from the former rather than from the Web directly.
(b) MetaCrawler does not display the total number of search results anywhere that I can find. It organizes results similarly to certain regular search engines, with sponsored-ad sites listed separately from the other search results, but next to each result on MetaCrawler is listed the search engine(s) through which the given search-result was identified.
(c) The "learning to create a web page" search on MetaCrawler turned up many of the more relevant results from the other search engines, with about 80% of the first ten results offering some sort of direct help with creating a web page. A couple of examples are "How to Create a Website" and "Learn to Create Web Pages Using HTML."

(a) Mamma produced about 207 million search results. The matches are organized similarly to MetaCrawler but without the notices regarding the search engines of origin.
(b) The first ten results are largely the same as on MetaCrawler, with about 80% seeming directly helpful to creating web pages, though they appear in a slightly different order.

(a) Google offers specific ways to search for multimedia.
(b) Besides general Web searches, Google enables multimedia searches specifically for images, maps, and videos.
(c) A YouTube search on Google for "Here I Go Again Whitesnake" produced 31 results.
(d) While no general warnings about usage of multimedia materials appear, a notice of potential copyright coverage appears when you select a particular search result in a Google Images search.