Other search engines

What search engines do you use and for what reason/s? All I’ve ever used is google for the longest time, but I know there are other cool ones out there. I even remember someone bashing google once a while ago for some reason.

Just curious.

Me.

What’s wrong with Google??

The only “cool” search engines I’m aware of are the ones that hijack your browser (if you use IE, anyway) and advertise at you until you reformat your hard drive. Other than that, you’ve just got plain old search engines, and Google is about the best of the lot.

I was thinking about search engines that had some other features that google didin’t.

www.altavista.com has an Mp3 and movie search that’s pretty cool
www.astalavista.com a friend introduced me to this one once in the way back when (for obvious reasons)
50.lycos.com this is pretty cool
teoma.com/ here’s one I heard about a long time ago and always wondered about. Seems like it’s pretty good.

Here’s some of the reasons to not like google www.google-watch.org

My homepage is still google :slight_smile:

[quote=“miltownkid”]What search engines do you use and for what reason/s? All I’ve ever used is google for the longest time, but I know there are other cool ones out there. I even remember someone bashing google once a while ago for some reason.

Just curious.

Me.[/quote]

Here’s a few:

AllTheWeb: alltheweb.com/
Teoma: teoma.com/
HotBot: hotbot.com/
Dogpile: dogpile.com/

There is a comparison chart of search engines here:

searchengineshowdown.com/features/

However, it’s not comprehensive, so don’t take it as the gospel. Still, worth a look.

regards,
Robert

A9 might be worth a try.

msn search has redesigned to look like google.

It has a neat trick too. Try typing in: a9.com/[search term(s)]

[quote=“kelake”]A9 might be worth a try.

msn search has redesigned to look like google.[/quote]

Problem is that MSN has been shown (many times) to color their page hits so as to create a favorable impression of Microsoft. Bad news stories about Windows viruses and such get moved way down, favorable news gets moved way up, really bad news (about Microsoft) just doesn’t appear at all. Bad news about Linux (some of which Microsoft generates, such as their paid for “scientific studies” showing that Linux is insecure and costs more than Windows) get moved way up. Reminds me of the novel “1984”.

As for Google, the situation is that they can (and do) take cash from companies in order to move their page rankings up. So yeah, Google is not totally unbiased, but I don’t suppose that any search engine is. That’s their bread and butter.

regards,
Robert

No they don’t. They do take cash for ads, but these always appear in a separate section under the heading ‘Sponsored Links’. There’s other web search companies that take cash for placement and just mix the paid links in with the regular search results which gives you no chance to know which ones are paid and which aren’t, but google absolutely does not do this. There are other companies that will help you increase your page-rank, but they have no connection to google, though some will claim they do.

Well, ok, I looked at it and it’s pretty stupid. Let’s see:
1) Google “outed” Valerie Plame.
No, it didn’t – the Washington Post did. And her husband kept the story alive by being a partisan asshole who is pumping the story for publicity for the DNC.

There was some crap on the Plame page which said that Google is the only place that will do a reverse-number lookup (put in a phone number, get the person’s name and address), but that’s complete idiocy on the part of the people who wrote that – several web phone number directories do that, and even the phone companies in the U.S. do it. Illinois Bell even had a phone number you could call to get the physical location that any phone number was placed at, back in 1993 – I used it when I had to go get a rifle part from a company which only sold mail-order. They were irritated that I showed up at their front door, but that’s life.
2) Google’s cookie expires in 2038
So? It happens to be the end of the current UNIX “epoch”:
clueless.com/jargon3.0.0/epoch.html
3) Google is rejecting ads from illegal web pharmacies
Er . . . good for them.
4) Google reordered a highly-placed link after it was sold to a marketing firm
Er . . . so? That’s what they’re supposed to do. The link no longer contained the information that it claimed to; the guy got high in the rankings, then sold the page to a company that put an ad on it.

I could probably go through it point-by-point, but since the first four are total drivel, I don’t see any point. Other than that people who used to make their living by charging people to artificially inflate search-engine rankings on Google are pissed off at Google for changing its system to try to ignore their crap. One hint to Google, though – the previous system actually worked better, given what some of my recent searches have turned up (tons of advertising pages offering to “look up” something for me AGAIN – through their own “preferred suppliers”).