Sniffing about in our neck of the woods

Your net decided to run some of the big guns of the search engine world through their paces.

How quickly can they find a list of New Zealand prime ministers? Did they know their Coates from their Masseys, their Frasers from their Forbes? By just typing in "New Zealand prime ministers" we see which come up with the goods.

* Google - The old favourite, came up first time with the perfect list of full names of all our prime ministers through history, from a site called A Touch Of New Zealand.

* alltheweb - On a par with Google as one of the best search engines for all uses, came up with just as good a result.

* excite - Good hit as well, got the list of PMs right at the top of the results.

* Direct Hit - Maybe a direct hit, but on the wrong target. First took this researcher to a site that said Jim Bolger was still our Prime Minister.

* HotBot - The good atonz.com site with the good list of PMs right at the top.

* iwon - Seems to work as well as the rest. Came up with the best atonz.com list, but a lot of advertising, including horrible pop-up ads.

* Look Smart - Too many ads. Took this searcher to the home page of a history site, not the list of prime ministers, as many of the other search engines did.

* MSN - An odd search engine, threw up encyclopedia entries about individual prime ministers, the websites, including the best ones, further down the page.

* SearchNetscape - Threw up some mad articles about how the New Zealand Government is actually unconstitutional, but very little about prime ministers.

* Ask Jeeves - Threw up some official sites of the New Zealand Government, but not as good as the rest.

A selection of some New Zealand websites to look at:

* Attitude's New Zealand Search Guide - Provides a portal to all the local search engines. Best place to start for a purely local search.

* SearchNZ - One of the better ones.

* NZ Search - A nice, big, easy-to-read site with groups of sites put into categories.

For those interested in the whole topic of search engines, try Search Engine Watch.