1) Google
a.170,000,000 total results, perhaps a quarter of them actually relate to learning to make web pages.
b. 23,000 results, and I would estimate more half of them relate to making a web page.
Bing
a. Total results - 108,000,000. I would estimate that one-quarter of these websites offer information consistant with the search.
b. Total results - 12,000. Maybe half of these websites are useful for composing a website and writing code.
AltaVista - 11,900 total results for the search in quotes.
Duck Duck, BlowSearch and Kartoo - numbers not shown.
2) The number of hits is not consistent across the search engines. Some are very well known, while some I have never heard of before. I think the lack of popularity and lack of general use could contribute to the wide range in the number of results.
I would use Bing if I was looking for a results panel filled with sites that were closer to the type of information I was looking for. I think sites like Bing, although they provide fewer search results, the results that are given are most likely closer to the desired information.
3) I do think Wolfram Alpha qualifies as a search engine. It is a search engine because it: 1)takes an input and spits out multiple outputs based on the information given, and 2) It searches the web and provides a list of resources based on the inquiry.
4) a. The metasite complies results from multiple search engines into one, providing the user with results from more than one individual search engine in one place.
b. Neither website would tell me the exact number of hits on my search, but both dogpile and MetaCrawler organized the hits into ad and web results sections.
c. I think the majority of the hits from the web results sections of these metasearch sites, provide information that is useful and close to the search requested.
5) a. My search on mamma - 'learning how to make webpages' yielded 19 hits. These results did not appear to have any form of external organization. The results appeared in a list on the first page of my search.
b. The search on mamma does not appear to be any different than other searches I have done for this exercise.
6) a. Looking at the front page of the Google search engine website, yes - there is a way to search only for multimedia.
b. Google allows you to search within a tab or a subsection of their website for news, images and videos.
c. 15,000 matches.
d. Some warnings included the ability to add a filter to my search (to keep out explicit content), the ability to search for images that were available for public use, and the ability to keep out images that have copyright restrictions.
If I were to choose a web hosting site to assist me in my web design, based on the list and the research I have done, I would choose either iPage, justhost.com or GoDaddy.
My first choice would be to work through iPage. As rated by top10bestwebhostingsites.com, they have the highest reliability score possible - 10/10. Their fee is minimal - 1.68 per month. They offer unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth and free domain. They have 100s of free templates to choose from and their customer support and customer feedback appears to be one of the best as far as hosting websites are concerned.