Yeah I read that yesterday Usil and thought of you. ;) So much for Microsoft looking to get into this particular niche of the market sounds like Bill has admitted defeat.
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Yeah I read that yesterday Usil and thought of you. ;) So much for Microsoft looking to get into this particular niche of the market sounds like Bill has admitted defeat.
Just thought I'd jump in and say I use this search engine.
http://vivisimo.com/
KartOO might be the strangest search engine. But, I've used it and it works quite well.
http://www.kartoo.com/en_index.htm
Here's a list of fairly specialized search engines. Some of the links may have died by now, but it's still a resource I use.
...ummm....
I think we may all be confusing search engine effectiveness with the pervasiveness of clever search engine 'gamers'...
What I mean by this, is that more and more sites have really pulled all the stops out to get themselves listed ahead of truly relevant search results.
As an (emabrassing) illustration:
When Star Wars Phantom Menace came out, just to prove a point about movie piracy, I entered a request on AltaVista for any available downloads of the film... on the very day it came out. I thought I was clever because quite a number of site matches came up. Someone in the room asked "where are these places?". I shrugged and suggested they were certainly overseas and probably from Asia "here let me click on the first one and see what happens...."
<BANG!> A triple XXX site! :eek: And it immediately went into spawn mode.. power slamming window after window faster than any mortal can point & click. Amidst the sounds of gasps and curses I found I was able, after all, to Alt-F4 faster than the pop-up frenzy.
And, to be sure, if you enter just about any term, you may be shocked to find that it will call up quite a few XXX sites. Imagine searching for a simple household item and clicking on an unwanted site? You might, for example, want "Little Debbie" snack cakes, and find that "Debbie Does Dallas" comes up as a possible hit.
Now, ... this is a little bit of what INTERNET-2 will be all about: not a new or different kind of technology, but some added smarts that isn't there now. So that if I enter "button hook" AND "football" I will not get any pages referencing either sewing or soccer... see what I mean?
At any rate; I was originally saying, that it may not be that our favorite search engines are suddenly degenerating in quality, as much as it is that slick operators have clogged the works with their various ways of gaming the system to their advantage (and to our detriment).
You got me curious now, what is INTERNET-2?Quote:
Now, ... this is a little bit of what INTERNET-2 will be all about
Hi!
Internet-2 is supposed to be a 'functional' re-vamp; but it's not a completely new web architecture or faster cabling or anything that will require new equipment of anyone.
It is more of a conceptual upgrade. In other words, now that more people are prepared to go for more information via the web, it is harder to siphon the extraneous from the truly relevant. So, search engines are being tweaked so that the 'smarts' w/in the engine can more precisely discern what the requestor wants.
Today, if I enter "Brown Sugar" AND "Rolling Stones" I will still get thousands of pages of baked goods, recipes, actresses, etc. In the future, the search engine will be smart enough to limit my search (and the only actress that will come up will be the one that is referenced in the song).
Let me see if I can find a reference for this... or you can email Screen Savers and ask them as well.
;)
In the meantime ...Quote:
Originally posted by M. David Petrella
In the future, the search engine will be smart enough to limit my search ...
Goggle Guide: An interactive tutorial on searching with Google.
http://www.googleguide.com/
I have recently been introduced to Dogpile which seems to be a very good search engine. Although it is not a search engine in and of itself, it brings the results of the leading search engines. It also has a toolbar and includes a running news update.
Many years back I was looking for U2 - Best Of Video and on of the links in the first page took me to a Porn site ??????????
So some people have been burying popular search text in their sites for years
It is amazing to me having watched the internet change and evolve over the years! I am 22, I started using the internet when I was 14. At that time I had to go to my friends house to use the internet or use the one at school. My buddy had AOL with a 33.6 MODEM. School had Netscape on these really old and slow computers. Anyways....I remember using AOL all the time at my buddies house, going into chat rooms and using IM. I remember AOL throwing fits over questionable software people used at the time called Faders (Made the text do cool things in AOL chat rooms). I remember using Webcrawler as my primary serach engine at the time, and I remember Geocities was much better!
As time progressed I started using Mamma.com as my search engine...I then saw the era where MP3's and ROMs and such were really big for people who knew about them and were traded without fear....I then Saw the rise and fall of Napster which brought attention to MP3's and ROM and other little programs to the rest of the world. This destroyed the era of Trading this stuff without fear and a lot of devoted web pages faded out of exsistance. I now use google as my search engine I now have to worry about spyware and adware taking ove my computer. I now find it much mroe difficult to find things that I am looking for. I also now use a cable modem (since 1998) and have stopped chatting so much online. I play more games online then anything else I do. I have seen the amount of online games skyrocket (Although I still love stracraft on battlenet).
The interenet is changing rapidly, who know what the next major search engine will be? Who know what big thing (Like napster) will gain public awarness and start some big revolution that will chagne the internet that much more. Who knows what kind of new threats and attacks we will have to worry about in the future. I can tell you one thing for sure...Back in 1996 I could never have imagined all of these chagnes.
Ah, memories.....
I hope google can pull themselves together a little more and remain topdog for a couple more years anyways.
Google has become a victim of their own dominance, their search results are easily modifiable by determined bloggers and paying advertisers. As others have previously mentioned in these posts, I've learned to construct my queries carefully to minimize the trash responses, but it can still be frustratingly useless.
But, I still think it's a brilliant tool for searching usenet archives or for finding images on the net. The usenet archives alone have solved the majority of system or application problems I've had, and resolved many arguments with my friends about lyrics for obscure, forgotten songs... That makes it worth it's weight in gold...!
Personally, I miss the days when Yahoo! solved all of my web search requirements and Google was just something I experimented with... I also remember thinking Google would never hold up against Webcrawler, so what do I know...? :D
Long story short, your choice of search engine is going to depend on the kind of info you search for regularly. The only way to really know is to try them out, some will be better than others and none of them will be perfect.
Sorry for the ramble...!
Cheers,
KV
I guess I should weigh in with my preference:
AltaVista
Back when the web first became available to the masses I observed the following about the various search engines:
WebCrawler (contrary to it's name) was the fastest
Yahoo was the best organized
AltaVista found the most and the most obscure (the main reason I still like it)
Lycos and others were middle of the road and were (at least it seemed to me at the time) trying to be like Yahoo: a portal.
You see, it seems to me that the popularity of Yahoo, Lycos, and Google is that you can set them up as your Home page, and they are your portal to, well, everything on the net... they are well organized for the average or newer user.
But, IMHO, that is why I try to steer clear. I don't want a 'window on the web'... I just want to search. And I want a search engine that will go to the farthest reaches (as the Lycos ad's would have you believe they do).
Ironically, when Yahoo first became popular, they were actually using AltaVista.
AltaVista has begun to tick me off lately, though, because they are offering 'prime real estate' on their search results pages to paying advertisers... you know, the 'sponsored' search results. Get out of my face please. And, again, all the savvy non relevant sites have figured out how to pay to get to the top of the search results.
Speaking of Savvy... there was a search site called SavvySearch which ran bulk searches using several of the most prevalent search engines at the time (sounds like what you folks here have ben saying about 'dogpile'). Those are okay.. if you're getting paid to investigate every picayune little possibility; but you run the risk of running head on into the dreaded 'information overload' we were warned about in the 80's.
Though I haven't used it in several years, Copernic used to be (IMO) one of the best search tools available.
Is there a good comparison site for Dogpile vs. Google vs. Yahoo! ? I have been using Yahoo! about as much as Google lately but I also really like Dogpile.Quote:
Originally posted by Murray S.
I use www.dogpile.com as a first choice for a search engine. Hardly use Google anymore at all.