Get Your Whale Fat Ice Cream Here

For this task we had to choose a search term and run it through our favourite search engine. I recently came into possession of a 5 kg parcel of whale fat, and the obvious question was..."what would an Eskimo do with it?" So I searched on the words "eskimo whale fat" hoping to find some interesting uses for the product.


When I searched Google I got 33'400 results. The first hit suggested I was about to learn a delicious recipe involving whale fat, alas it was some sort of discussion board with only two entries on it. I suppose igloo's are not the most computer, or for that matter, electricity friendly places.

The second part of the task involved using Copernicus or other similar search engine. This is where the whale fat hit the fan, Apples version of Copernicus is Sherlock... and in my humble opinion Sherlock sucks, I hated it. So in the quest for a suitable replacement I came across Clusty and it rocks! It queries several search engines and then presents "clusters" of sites on various themes. Its cool... So I entered my search term again and...


This netted a select 173 results out of a possible 4'640. But it also groups clustered results with the number of hits in the cluster (on the left)... To my amazement I see the perfect cluster, so I click on "Icecream (8 hits)"...


The Clusty Search gave me a more fined search, and gave me the option of their results by topic so I could hone in on what I wanted. I can now treat the family to a traditional Eskimo feast, Moose head soup followed by some Igloo style Whale Fat Ice Cream. Mmm, does anyone know where I can get a Moose Head?

*** BOO ITS AN UPDATE ***

Figured I may as well tack this on here rather than start a new post so here is the Boolean gear.

Using the Boolean Search technique I used Google to search "eskimo whale fat" with the addition of AND, OR, +, "" and NOT

The use of eskimo OR whale OR fat gave me the largest result, searching on each individual word giving a useless 361'000'000 results!

The AND gave me a more refined result of 284'000

The use of eskimo + whale + fat gave me the best result of 33'400. I noticed a lot of the early hits involved whaling, a topic I wasn't interested in so I searched on eskimo + whale + fat NOT whaling and this further refined the results to 26'500.

Using the "eskimo whale fat" was too restrictive and netted 2 useless results

If I wanted only information coming from Universities I could go to advanced options and request that the engine only search in the '.edu' domain.

I have learnt a lot about effective searching here, and will put this to good use in the future.