Third Posting:-The Differences and Similarities Between Mamma.com, Google scholar, Eric Digest and Yahoo.com

Mamma.com is a metasearch engine. Copernic Inc., originally called Mamma.com, launched in 1996 by Herman Tumurcuoglu, was one of the web's first metasearch engines. With its head office located in Montreal, Canada, Mamma.com is a tier 2 search engine. Prior to the name change, its slogan was "The Mother Of All Search Engines".

Google Scholar enables searching for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports from all broad areas. Google Scholar is a freely-accessible Web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of the world's largest scientific publishers. It is similar in function to the freely available Scirus from Elsevier, CiteSeer, and getCITED. It is also similar to the subscription-based tools, Elsevier's Scopus and Thomson ISI's Web of Science. Google Scholar nonetheless claims to cover more websites, journal sources and languages. Its advertising slogan — "Stand on the shoulders of giants" — is a nod to the scholars who have contributed to their fields over the centuries, providing the foundation for new intellectual achievements.

Eric Digest is short reports (1,000 - 1,500 words) on topics of prime current interest in education. There are a large variety of topics covered including teaching, learning, libraries, charter schools, special education, higher education, home schooling, and many more.

- targeted specifically for teachers, administrators, policymakers, and other practitioners, but generally useful to the broad educational community.

- designed to provide an overview of information on a given topic, plus references to items providing more detailed information.

- produced by the former 16 subject-specialized ERIC Clearinghouses, and reviewed by experts and content specialists in the field.

- funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), of the U.S. Department of Education (ED).

- The full-text ERIC Digest database contains over 3000 Digests with the latest updates being added to this site in July 2005.

Yahoo.com is a leading search engine and information portal. A unique feature of Yahoo! is that one may access every service consistently through one Yahoo! ID. By signing up for a Yahoo! ID, one may instantly have access to a home page, email account, and chat/IM account. Furthermore, the services are all integrated with each other, so that mail notifications from a Yahoo! group will go to the owner's mail account, email friends may be automatically added to the IM watch list, and so on.

In my opinion, Mamma.com, Google Scholar and Yahoo.com are more similar to each other because they are the search engines for anything but Eric Digest is more to education and specially for teachers, administrators, policymakers, and other practitioners. I think Mamma.com is not that popular yet compared to Google Scholar and Yahoo.com because of the usage of among students and society. We usually use Yahoo.com to chat while Google Scholar to search for information and its more specific.