Reviewed July 1998
Review by Richard Goodman
Sportszine UK covers quite a wide range of sports, ranging from the standard football, cricket and rugby, to such unusual suspects as skydiving and windsurfing. It is basically a database of sports related Web sites. They do offer a brief "latest sports news" page, but offer many more links to other news and results services. They have a "Site of the Month", competitions and also online chats with sports stars. There is also some banner advertising, but this is not too intrusive.
Sportszine UK is searchable, but the search engine leaves much to be desired. Search from the main page for "Southend United" and you get 92 matches. It is hard to imagine that there are 92 Southend United Web sites, and looking at the results returned you see that there appears to be only 1 Southend United Web site on the database. Most of the other matches are other teams whose names end with "United".
There is no easily visible advice on how to search the site. What about using Boolean Operators? Well, keying in "Southend AND United" brings back 1166 matches. The search engine has found pages which contain the word "AND". It doesn't really fill you with confidence does it? Needless to say, "OR" does the same.
If you search from the main page for just "Southend" you get 2 matches, 1 for football, 1 for cricket. But, if you search from within the football section you get 3 matches. So what happened to the extra 2 before? If you just browse through the site each sport is divided up into categories, very much in the Yahoo! mould. There are a lot of sites, and most of what I would consider to be the good sites on certain sports are there, apart from a link to the main page of Soccernet (although pages from that site are referenced). Users are encouraged to report broken links.
So, if you are looking for sports- related Web sites, it's quite a good
place to start but you might need to look carefully to find exactly what
you are searching for. The site can be checked out at
http://www.sportszineuk.co.uk
Reviewed by: Richard Goodman
Online Teaching and Learning Development
Loughborough University Computing Services.
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This page last updated on 24-Jul-1998