1. a. The web page that I am defaulted to is Google.com.
b. This web page appears because I set my home page to Google. I can change this default setting by going into the browser's Options and changing the Home Page address in the General tab.
2. Yes, you can change the appearance of web pages within the browser. It can be changed in Options under the Content tab. There is a drop down menu which allows you to choose a default font and another drop down menu which allows you to choose a font size. One reason you may want to change your default font is because the current font is not very easy to read. It may be more comfortable for you to read a larger or bolder font.
3. The default search engine on my browser is Google. I am able to use it either by directly entering my search into the address bar or into the search bar next to it. The default search engine can be changed by clicking on the arrow next to the search engine's icon and then clicking Manage Search Engines...
4. a. I got about 320,000,000 results. The first five pages show results about learning to make web pages. The results after that start to dwindle in relevancy until they show about one word from the original search term.
b. I got about 35,300 results. Some of the results I got were:
It seems like less of the results relate to the search. It shows more sites about people learning to make their own web pages. I would say about 30 relative results in the first few pages.
5. The number of hits are not consistent across the search engines. The number of results got lower as I went down the list. BlowSearch had no second page of results and Kartoo did not even seem to exist. The more popular search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo!, show more results because they probably have a larger index. I might use another search engine besides Google if I feel that my results are too personalized or full of too many ads for people.
6. I do not think that Wolfram Alpha is a search engine. I would agree with its title as a "computational knowledge engine." It does not search for a wide range of websites that may be of help, but rather computes or calculates the specific answer that it believes you are looking for.
7. a. A metasite combines the search results of multiple search sites.
b. Dogpile did not list a specific number of results. While Google organized the results by how many words it had in common with the search term, Dogpile's results were more organized by how relative its contents were to the search term.
c.
8. a. Mamma did not list a specific number of matches. The matches go from learning to make web pages to building web pages to learning HTML for your web page.
b. Dogpile focused more on the sole task of making a web page. The results focused on the search terms.
9. a. Yes, there is a way to search specifically for multimedia on Bing.
b. The multimedia options are images and videos.
c. I did an image search for White Rhinos. I could not find a specific number for the amount of searches, but it was a lot.
d. No, I did not see any warnings or disclaimers about using the images.
I would use WebHostingHub. I like that it has themes and tools that I can easily use to create different types of web pages such as blogs, forums, or photo galleries. It also has unlimited hosting and the price is not bad for $3.99 a month.