I LIVE outside Swindon, to find out what's on in the town I use the internet.

As a young adult, it is important to me that I can easily access information that is interesting and relevant to what I want.

Unlike an older person, looking for a job perhaps, I am searching for completely different things.

To investigate which search engines give me the more useful information, I simply typed 'Swindon' into three popular sites: Google, Bing and Yahoo.

From my quick query, Google gave 28,900,000 hits.

Bing resulted in the least number of sites with only 5,270,000 whereas Yahoo gave a massive 71,400,000.

As well as the number of hits each search got, I also looked at the top five results from each search engine.

The most popular search on each was different. Swindon Borough Council's website starred in all searches.

Wikipedia's page on Swindon Town was also present in each top five.

My first search was on Google. The top result was Google Maps. I think this is helpful to anyone who does not live in Swindon. Also this is good, considering a survey in 2010 showed that Google held 79.6 per cent of the market.

I think this is important because people visiting Swindon will often need directions.

Other results that came from Google included Swindon Town Football Club and Visit Wiltshire.

Bing also gave similar results, however it did not have as many hits. This is because Bing is not a particularly well known search engine, although it is the search engine provided by the programme Internet Explorer, so most computers have it.

For its third result, Bing had SwindonWeb which is a local website for images, jobs and news.

This is good because it has lots of helpful information about what is on at the time and what is happening locally.

Yahoo had the most hits out of all my searches.

This means they do not refine their searches as much as Google do. The top result was for Yahoo images of Swindon.

The first picture was a shot of Swindon High Street, followed by lots of diagrams of 'How to Get around Swindon's Magic Roundabout in One Piece'.

Interestingly, the Swindon Advertiser's Website did not feature in any of my search lists.

This is a shame because I know that this is updated daily with shows, events, clubs and reviews as well as the local news and advertisements.

I think these results do not fully tell me what I wanted. I was looking for local events and local news. But if I edit my search, for example 'Swindon local events', I get the website SwindonEvents on all three of my search engines.

I think the websites that came up on my original search of 'Swindon' are helpful if you're a local looking for bin collection times or a new job but not so for a teenager looking for a good day out.

Swindon Advertiser: Blob By Katie Draper, 15, Sheldon School