Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Hiking in Austin


I used Google to research a good place to go hiking within 60 miles of Austin. I was able to find well over 30 listings of different places to go hiking. In Google, I keyed in “hiking austin” and browsed through the first page of results. The links that interested me were http://www.austinexplorer.com/hiking/, http://www.trails.com/ and http://www.virtualtourist.com/. These sites listed different parks around the area and also listed user reviews of each park. While browsing virtualtourist.com, I discovered a link to http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/. This site is sponsored by Texas Parks and Wildlife and lists activities one can participate in at the park, price for admission, weather conditions and a downloadable map of the area. I think it is strange that the Texas Parks and Wildlife website did not come up in my first page of search results.

When I performed the same search in Yahoo, most of the same sites came up; however, Yahoo’s first listing was a chart that listed popular hiking events with dates and times for the events. The information comes from http://upcoming.yahoo.com. I haven’t used this feature before because I didn’t know Yahoo had it. I may use it a lot more in the future.

No comments: