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Why not point us all to an engine with better search results then?

here you go

There are a lot of searches that work better on ATW then google these days. The most obvious to me is Autopr0n Autopr0n Now, I'm not just being narsisistic here, When I started AP google returned not a single result for "autopr0n". Now there are thousands. Google's first result is my slashdot info, it's second Is my live journal, then my k5 info. All of those sites link to Autopr0n.com. After the main link, Alltheweb links to a lot of sites that link to me, just like google did for several months. Now google returns a seeming random sites that either link to me or mention me. It used to be bogs and people actually talking about my site.

I guess a page with a bunch of pr0n links == "crap" to them, but it's still annoying. I'm not trying to google bomb them, and in the first month I got lots of hits from people searching google for "autopr0n". Pretty stupid, but still. I've also noticed bad results for a lot of technical queries lately. If I could remember any, I might have been able to come up with a better post. A month or so ago a search for "make file syntax" would return a message board post asking about it, while ATW would return the make file manual. They seem to have fixed that, though.

Why not point us all to an engine with better search results then?

here you go

There are a lot of searches that work better on ATW then google these days. The most obvious to me is Autopr0n Autopr0n Now, I'm not just being narsisistic here, When I started AP google returned not a single result for "autopr0n". Now there are thousands. Google's first result is my slashdot info, it's second Is my live journal, then my k5 info. All of those sites link to Autopr0n.com. After the main link, Alltheweb links to a lot of sites that link to me, just like google did for several months. Now google returns a seeming random sites that either link to me or mention me. It used to be bogs and people actually talking about my site.

I guess a page with a bunch of pr0n links == "crap" to them, but it's still annoying. I'm not trying to google bomb them, and in the first month I got lots of hits from people searching google for "autopr0n". Pretty stupid, but still. I've also noticed bad results for a lot of technical queries lately. If I could remember any, I might have been able to come up with a better post. A month or so ago a search for "make file syntax" would return a message board post asking about it, while ATW would return the make file manual. They seem to have fixed that, though.

Actually, the directory is simply a reformatted version of the Open Directory, so MS would have to fight yet another OSS project to get control of Google's directory. Nutch looks like it could be the open source candidate, and AllTheWeb is the closed source candidate for a new search engine (it can search for audio or video). AllTheWeb doesn't have a Usenet search, but they do have a file search (think of putting ANYTHING in the filetype: parameter). Maybe Deja.com could buy Google Groups back (if GG were bought by Deja.com, the domain would be available - deja.com points to groups.google.com)...

Tried Alltheweb lately?

why no competition?

All The Web has been around for ages.

The baby breathing thing is nice, but beyond that I never felt the need to monitor my kid 24/7. In fact, I find the idea kind of creepy.At best it smacks of neurosis on the part of the parent.

There is that thing called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Basically small kids just tend to die from time to time for no apparent reason. :( "SIDS is the leading killer of infants between one week and one year with an
approximate rate of two per thousand live births (1 in 500). 6000-7000 babies die of SIDS every year in the US." (from SIDS FAQ)

So this is not neurosis, this is trying to save the children (tm). There are some reasons to believe that if you can get to the kid real fast, you might have a chance to save him. 24/7/365 monitoring comes handy.

Thanks to alltheweb image search

Here is what I use, for what it's worth. Sorry, no links, too lazy for that - AllTheWeb is your friend.

Top 10:
Browser - Opera
Mail client - The Bat!
IM - Miranda
File navigator - FAR
Treepad - extremely useful thing
Winamp - play music
BSPlayer or Sasami2k - play video
Antivirus - Kaspersky AVP
ACDSee or IrfanView to view images. PicaView is also very cool.
Firewall - AtGuard!

some more
Spam filter - either use built-in or get K9 (easy to use bayesian filter)
A news reader (if needed) - ForteAgent (although I don't like it, but haven't seen anything better)
Media Player Classic with Real and Quicktime support (check Kazaa Lite Plus page) - no need to use clunky proprietary players
Something to rip CDs, encode MP3s and record CDs. I use Nero and RazorLame. A virtual CD, like Alcohol 120%, may be.
Image editor - PhotoImpact
To view annoying PDF files - Acrobat Reader
WatzNew - to check websites
Proximotron - for fixing the web :)
Internet Maniac - a bunch of tools like Ping and Traceroute
NetLimiter - manage bandwidth between applications
filesharing - Kazaa, eMule, Shareaza
Download managers - Offline Explorer
Stream downloaders - StreamBox
Alarm - Music Alarm Clock (the only one I know with fadein/fadeout)
Desknote - to place post-it notes on your desktop
Cool Desk - virtual desktops
Ad-aware - to remove adware and spyware
VoptXP - drive defragmenter
Remote Administrator or VNC - for remote administration
PGPTools - encryption

Yeah, it's more than 10, but there is no such thing as too much software. :)

Has anyone else noticed that the "spam" sort of sites that are nothing but link farms and Gator popups are getting much better at finding their way into Google's rankings? I switched to Google back in the day after search engines like altavista became overrun with such sites. Now I've noticed that they occasionally creep into their rankings...I guess entropy is the way of the universe after all.

I've been noticing it a lot lately, on all sorts of searches. It's almost enough to make me want to start using a better search engine instead.

As yerricde said, this is an optional feature that can be turned off in the preferences. I would also like to add that users are informed that it was activated and are presented with a link to search for the same words without quotes. And of course, it is only activated when the phrase is really common. And even better, AllTheWeb can group just a few words inside your search, not necessarily the whole phrase.

At the risk of making Google look bad, decent search engines automatically add quotes to common phrases.

At the risk of making Google look bad, decent search engines automatically add quotes to common phrases.

That's called ambitious how? We really had computers for half a century. We had Internet for about 20 years. Look what we were able to do already. Even according to very conservative estimates, computers are going to become tens of thousands times more powerful (may be much much faster). And Google says it will take 300 years to build an intelligent search agent? Talk about ambitions.

Even ignoring the possibility of Singularity this is going to happen much much sooner.

P.S. BTW, it seems that Google still hasn't restored the links to KaZaA Lite sites.

alltheweb.com is a pretty good Google alternative. They even have an FTP search tab.

I'd rather have to deal with a spyware client and have Google censor KaZaA Lite results, than let RIAA destroy P2P.

google doesn't bother with extraneous crap. Altavista and AllTheWeb both support more types of searches than google.

A single feature is useless when another engine still returns better results. I still use google for text searches, only hopping over to altavista for a music search.

> What OTHER search engine do you still use, and why?

AllTheWeb, because they have a nice FTP search as well as audio and video searches.
AltaVista, because they have better boolean and wildcard features as well as audio and video searches and a Google-like toolbar.

Alltheweb is quite good. But even there do you see the effects of Google. Just look at the page design and layout. Same thing goes for Altavista and even Yahoo! search.

And I'm really, really glad that Google has this influence. Before Google, most search engines were getting cluttered with advertisements and nasty, slowly-loading designs (yes, that was when modems were prevalent). Google did the one right thing and focused on the important stuff, building a good and fast search engine with a pragmatic, to-the-point, minimalist design and about every function you'd need to find what you're looking for.

That's why I love Google. And also, I for one never really had censoring problems with my searches. And what can Google do when others threaten them with lawsuits? It's those others that we should criticize, not Google itself... I'm rather glad when Google makes a small adjustment (though I don't like it either) that at least allows them to continue to exist instead of being driven out of money.

But bringing up Alltheweb is also interesting in this regard; it shows that nobody can really stop the spread of information, whatever kind it is... if Google is sued, somebody else will link to KaZaA Lite. In this regard, the Web is like a Hydra for free information.

AlltheWeb is even better at this, because it "[adds the] quotes to common phrases".

alltheweb. why? because they still have kazaa lite, anti-scientology and DeCSS links.
Because they are European
Because they have the biggest index of pages on the web.

All The Web might be a better bet than AltaVista

Alltheweb doesn't quite have a Google Groups or a News Google equivalent (only news search; no headline parser), but the regular search is pretty cool.

Alltheweb doesn't quite have a Google Groups or a News Google equivalent (only news search; no headline parser), but the regular search is pretty cool.

Alltheweb

Before I settled on Google, I remember these guys were running neck and neck with Google producing very high quality search results. Give it a try.

It's a shame Google chose to remove the links instead of fighting the case.

Try alltheweb.com. The link search seems to better over there.

The following statistic has been generated using
link:domain -site:domain

yahoo.com: 73,025,040
google.com: 20,613,802
msn.com: 15,157,713
msnbc.com: 3,042,855

Yahoo scores mainly because they have lots of other domains like geocities or four11.

> Altavista and infoseek and Lycos were search engine kings at one time. Whither this trio?

I agree about infoseek and Lycos but AV, while no longer "king", is still a very useful secondary search engine that nicely complements Google when you run into Google's limitations:
- It has a better support of boolean searches (including wildcards).
- It does not limit searches to 10 words.
- It supports searching for audio or video files.

There are other features which can be of interest to some people:
- Incremental refinement of searches using "Prisma".
- Shortcuts.

By the way, they also recently added a toolbar (similar to Google's).

So, while not endangering Google's #1 position, AltaVista (and AllTheWeb too) could still be a useful addition to your search toolbox.

-FL

Actually, Google is bloating like crazy. If you want "just search", I'd suggest you go for All The Web. They're now owned by Overture, and the site is very focused on the web.

How bout you try your searches on alltheweb or altavista which are both owned by Overture?

Carl

• Wildcards or at least word stemming.
  
• Better boolean expression support (including parentheses).
  
• More than 10 words in a query.
  
• Selective case sesitivity.
  
• Better support for file formats (such as, searching specific extensions).
  

• Good enough (read: convenient).
  
• The only search engine that indexes Usenet.
  
• Caches the pages.
  
• Offers the clean, customizable and very usable GoogleBar.
  

• Wildcards or at least word stemming.
  
• Better boolean expression support (including parentheses).
  
• More than 10 words in a query.
  
• Selective case sesitivity.
  
• Better support for file formats (such as, searching specific extensions).
  

• Good enough (read: convenient).
  
• The only search engine that indexes Usenet.
  
• Caches the pages.
  
• Offers the clean, customizable and very usable GoogleBar.
  

Speaking of major search engines, there's also this one:

FAST used to be a Norwegian search engine (from the ftpsearch.ntnu.no guys), and presumably hard to get at for the *AA, but now their Internet Search has been sold off to a US company (that's the 3. Profit!! part).

Still it appears that it's easier to go after the little guy...

Regards,
--
*Art

Alltheweb, a growing search engine, has an audio search. I know that it has indexed copywrited music. Hundreds if not thousands of people find music files with it. Why hasn't the RIAA gone after them?

The big guys are bullying the little guys.

Alltheweb, a growing search engine, has an audio search. I know that it has indexed copywrited music. Hundreds if not thousands of people find music files with it. Why hasn't the RIAA gone after them?

The big guys are bullying the little guys.

imagine, when boards are self contained on one microchip, the name will be the "ultra gigaplexor 90000000 duplex teranaxor"

Perhaps they need somebody to end the madness? (One of) the first electronic computers was called ENIAC. Then came the UNIVAC and the ILLIAC, etc. So somebody called their computer MANIAC, and ended that tradition.
I like to think of Windows 98 as being derived from the MANIAC, while Windows XP is made BY maniacs.

Serioulsy though, I think microcontrollers is a kind of fusion of CPU/RAM/ROM other circuits, and they usually have shorter names than desktop CPUs have, IIRC.

For example: try searching google for "key biscayne triathlon trilogy" (no quotes). You will only find useless links. Or try finding a bike ride we have here, "great tour of coconut grove" -- same story.

Yet I've had decent content for both of those topics, with photos, in pages that have dates in them, here and here.

Or, if you want yet another example...try searching for "Arnaldo Cohen Jacksonville" -- Arnaldo Cohen is a pianist...and I have a page up with qt movies of the performance, here -- and google doesn't have it.

I see googlebot on my "blog" all the time -- but nothing's ever added to the index, or if it is, it stays there for 1 day and then disappears.

Alltheweb.com, which is powered by fastsearch's engines, have nearly all my stuff indexed, even though they have about 1 billion fewer pages indexed than google.

So what's the story? Am I being excluded because Google thinks I'm a blog? Or do Google's crawlers suck?

Norway is full of nomes allready. (Well it is really more like a -1 Troll, or -1 Flamebait, but whatever).

gnome mirror.

Search

Sorry

Google washes whiter

"Google has made its own statement on the 'Googlewash': by making The Register story that coined the phrase disappear from its search results."

"Not all the search results, mark you, but a very specific one. When you search for the word "Googlewash" (as at 9pm Pacific Time last night) around a hundred results are returned by default. Our story, which is where the word was coined, isn't among them."

"We found it, eventually, but it was very difficult." ... ..."So a story that coins a phrase, and that dozens of others link to, should be pretty near the top."

"Here's what the snapshot looks like now. It's a fluid situation, but as we write, a search for Googlewashed returns 108 results. (Earlier on, it was 111. The number varies, but the end-result is the same, as you'll see)." ...

"Clearly, somoene at Google doesn't like the word "Googlewashed"."

"Now then. Google hasn't quite concealed the origin of the Googlewash phrase. If you search for Googlewash, or Googlewashed with the parameter, site:www.theregister.co.uk, you'll find a cluster of four pages with the original in fourth place. So the story itself has not been deleted from the index."

"What's happened is that PageRank has hidden it out plain sight."

"Now we must remember that Google, based in Mountain View, California is a private corporation, and it can do whatever the hell it likes with its page rankings."

There isn't a search engine in the world that isn't susceptible to some kind of pressure, payola, gaming or otherwise." ...

If you have a problem with this then fight google. Start using search engine like Teoma, Alltheweb, and Wisenut. Google is dominate in a large part to timing. The alternative search engines I mentioned are pretty darn good, but I must admit I do still think Google is better. But if these companies had the resources of Google they could probably crawl more of the web, attract better talent, etc.

Try to find papers about LCD technology... You end up with tens of thousands of links to "cheap LCD" or "best LCD display".

Search engines (in general) are getting too "comercial" (Hey! they have to make a living...) Maybe a good idea would be a "Techie" search engine? does anybody know about something like that?

Or to Alltheweb ?

But if you look at Altavista in 1996, before the big portalization, you'll still see a bit more clutter than you see on Google. And, Excite in 1996 is far from clean. I can't remember Excite any earlier because I don't think I ever used it much. I was a devoted AltaVista user until they stopped/slowed indexing new sites, portalized it, and just made it not worth using. Then I found Google, and it became my new home page.

You can not deny, however, that Teoma, HotBot, AllTheWeb, AltaVista and WiseNut have all been influenced by Google's successful design. You don't need to invent something to make it popular.

Well, alltheweb digs up 41 sites other then slashdot or k5 that have links to me. Google apparently can't handle the link:... and -site:... commands together, but finds 87 pages not on slashdot or k5 that discuss me. Most of those pages also link. None of them were written by me.

Lets not forget that nothing else out there is called autopr0n, and almost every single page that does have the term also has a link to my site. Especially those which appear at the beginning of the search results.

Intresting experiment, try doing a search for "redhat 8 ISOs" on google and on Alltheweb, then get back to me on how great google is.

"In the vernacular it has come to mean search in much the same way xerox has come to mean copy documents"

Not really when I tell you to xerox this I generally don't care what you use to do it, just make me a copy.

When I tell you to google for something... that means goto google and search for it, not yahoo or all the web, or ANY other search engine, GOOGLE and google only

Of course could the devil sue for me telling you to go to hell? its a common verb, but it also pertains to a specific place.
Don't take that the wrong way, I just thought of it as I was finishing my ramblings.

Same damn post, but I'm not so god damn lazy.

I was looking for red hat 8 ISOs the other day, and did the obvious thing. Typed in "Redhat 8 ISOs" into google. I got back a bunch of random message board posts in foreign languages.

I tried the same thing at alltheweb and got back two links to to rethat 8 ISOs.

Of course my main beef with google is that Autopr0n.com shows on the 10th page or something on a search for something as obvious as "autopr0n" or "autopr0n.com" on google now. I actually had someone email me to complain the other day (since they actually used the "I'm feeling lucky button" rather then typing in URLs). The first links are to my slashdot and kuro5hin user info pages, then links to tons of pages that link to my site.

I'm guessing it has something to do with the fact that I link to tons of porn with relevant descriptions, but I'm not trying to fool google at all, and I'm definitely not a Spam site.

I really think google went overboard doing whatever it is they did, and caused their site to suffer. I still search with google first, but I don't know how long I'll do that if alltheweb starts to turn up better results.

The company 'FAST' quoted in the article should NOT link to www.surffast.com. Obviously this is refering to the Norwegian company www.fastsearch.com who operates the supposed 'Google-killer'(obviously a bit magnamimous, yet still a good alternative) www.alltheweb.com .

Personally, I think alltheweb may have a beat on Google in the next year or so. Huge index based on their own search product, some bells and whistles to boot, and rather lightweight.

Try All The Web. Doesn't have a groups section though, which is convinient if you are asking a question rather than searching for something.

Interestingly enough, no other major search engine used THAT strategy yet

Ever heard of alltheweb?

They even have a google based skin you can use.

Interestingly enough, no other major search engine used THAT strategy yet

Ever heard of alltheweb?

They even have a google based skin you can use.