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Ikr? Same with HotBot, and InfoSpace and Lycos and Metacrawler and WebCrawler and Dogpile and Looksmart and so on...

I get these confused ALL THE TIME with Google!

Did you mean: "Are there any search engines left that try to think for me?" Try one of the following:

https://google.com
https://bing.com
https://duckduckgo.com
https://dogpile.com

http://www.dogpile.com/
metasearch

I don't see this monopoly (virtual or otherwise) in search that you are talking about. Care to provide examples?

In that case, allow me.
This is just a small sample of how wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong and hella wrong you are.

That list is far from complete, and is mostly USA-centric. In other countries, not only are there more search providers, but Google does not even rank in the top lists. Or just look at China, where Google is made fun of similar to AOL is in the US today.

If that is what you label a monopoly, I really want to know what you call companies like Microsoft regarding desktop operating systems - or the phone company - or patents/copyrights for that matter.

Please avoid using anything from Google. I have considerably reduced my usage of gmail, google drive, and my android tablet .... Please DO NOT give them additional access to your computer, phone etc. They already know too much.

For Windows, Chrome has a service to keep Chrome updated, I've always disabled the ability for it to phone home and install anything at anytime and don't run Chrome anymore because of it.

FireFox has started the same thing, the service is called "Mozilla Maintenance Service" which I've disabled. I use FireFox for BattleField 3 only, Opera is my browser of choice.

As a rule I disable the updating of any program, flash tells me when an update is available, Java updates I catch as they are mentioned, and Windows updates I wait to see how many computers are taken down first.

Google is still my search engine, http://www.dogpile.com/ used to have a neat page called SearchSpy where you could watch what people were searching for in real time, you learn a lot watching that and more aware.

You are just another shill.

GIT cher search engine HEeeeyaaAA!

I guess nobody remembers dogpile, or did Apple invent that too?

Ah, I remember that. Metacrawler was the same concept.

I remember putting a lot of thought into whether Dogpile or Metacrawler would win out. Then Google appeared, and made the question moot.
Dogpile and Metacrawrler both incorporated Google, but the non-google results just decreased the usability.

I'm not sure what's worse, the changes Google has made, or the way they've been blowing off thousands of rational (i.e. not ranting) user complaints about it in their forums.

After becoming frustrated with those changes a few months ago, I started using Dogpile as my primary engine for the search operators (which give me much better results) & simpler interface. Mixing that with Yubnub.org so I can move my search terms between all different engines has been working out really well.

I pretty much cover my tracks online. Nothing as drastic
as using a proxie, but the normal stuff; delete ALL cookies
run a HOSTS file, Peerblock, use Spamhaus and change my
identity occasionally http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/
as a start.

http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/searchspy/results.htm?fci=1?filter=0&qcat=web
is an old link that doesn't work anymore but would show what searches were
being processed at that time, it was an eye opener.

But with Google (the only search engine I use) I'm an open
book with my search terms. Which if used out of context could
come across badly.

I post to the Newsgroup: 24hoursupport.helpdesk, any subject is
valid and I search each to offer help, some of my searches are down
right abnormal.

I use Google as my dictionary "define:xxxxx" as well as spell checker.
Site specific as the results are far beyond the search ability of the site itself:
top 100 stories +directv site:slashdot.org

Using Google goes against everything I practice, but there is no way
I would allow Microsoft this search information. They have long
ago proved themselves unworthy of my trust.

Is Google any better? I'm putting a lot of faith in "Do no harm".

BTW: my slashdot.org account is the real me.

I still don't understand how this is in any way dodgey or underhanded.

The main explanation is that they're second-sourcing google's results without giving them due credit.

The evidence for this is that there are a number of sites that openly use google's search, and google doesn't object. There's always lmgtfy.com, of course, which credits google in their name. There's dogpile.com, which searches a list of sites that includes google and has its own scheme for ordering the results.

But bing does this without acknowledging google. When google point out what bing is doing, the reply is to deny it. Microsoft is pretending that the results are bing's, and weren't gotten from another search site.

In scholarly, scientific and mathematical fields, failing to credit your sources is one of the cardinal sins. But if you properly credit your sources, they smile and thank you for the reference. This is basically a case of the same thing in the commercial world.

Some years back, there was a related fuss over Sun's use of Open Source software. The problem wasn't that Sun was including this software in their distributions. Everyone approved of that. Sun's sin was that they stripped out the attributions in the code, claiming in effect that it was all Sun's creation. They got into a lot of trouble with the Open Source crowd until Sun apologized and corrected the problem. If you're not going to pay someone for using their stuff, you should at least acknowledge their work.

Maybe, instead of trying to pretend that they've made a big mistake, Microsoft should just 'fess up, apologize, and add an explanation similar to dogpile's saying whose data they're including. I just did a dogpile search for a question on a mailing list that I read, and the results all include a small-print statement like "Found on: Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search" or "Found exclusively on: Google". If bing were to do this, google would probably withdraw their lawsuit.

Alternatively, bing users might just start using dogpile, which is a lot more honest about where they get their information.

dogpile.com is a search engine conglomerator. Dogpile returns search results from Yahoo, Live Search, MSN and Google. Just like the parent this post was in reply to mentioned.

So an on topic salient point is once again modded "troll" because a neophyte internet user has mod points, but lacks basic knowledge of the subject being discussed. (yea I know, I must be new here)

At least we can take comfort in the fact that moderator abuse can backfire because "Unfair" metamods count against the "unfair" moderator's Karma.

Wondering what Google was planning to do with the information they're constantly gathering on me between my emails, searches, news, websites I visit (tracked through adsense), etc, brought me to find a decent set of alternatives: Scroogle for searches, Roundcube for email, and scraper sites like Zewg and Dogpile for everything else.

Google is "finally succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar"

The dollar is quite the temptress and very deceitful. Following the money has led many to the path of destruction. The record companies have tried to collude and through artificial scarcity kept CD prices way above reasonable. Sales have fallen as a result of completion even though i Pod sales skyrocket.

Google has command of the advertising market. If they follow the temptress and try to follow the money, then Google will become just another search engine.

It would be sad to see Google become another ad-laden site with no special attraction to the users. Is Google stupid enough to ditch tons of eyeballs to get a slightly higher price per ad?

Others are ditching the overburdening pages and imitating Google's success. Most of these pages now don't load their page with banner advertisements anymore and for good reason. They lost major market share to Google because of it. They have modeled Google.

http://www.altavista.com/
http://www.dogpile.com/
http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true&mkt=en-US
http://search.yahoo.com/
http://www.hotbot.com/

If Google gets tempted by the money, they may find themselves quickly in the company of almost dead search engines that they stomped. They know how the other search engines dropped to obscurity. Why are they even interested in putting on that well known way to the bottom of the search engines.

Well, here is the whole shitload: http://www.dogpile.com/

The Top-10 Alternatives to "I googled it" (note the lower-case 'g'):

• 10 "I AltaVista'd it" (potential ad campaign: "Hasta la vista, Google!")
• 9 "I Yahoo!'d it" (Good luck with that lawsuit; it's been in the official motto of several states for decades!)
• 8 "I Asked it" (AKA "I just axed it", since they "axed" poor Jeeves...)
• 7 "I HotBot'd it" (She's not all that hot these days...)
• 6 "I WebCrawler'd it" (Crawl being the operative word; no speed records broken here!)
• 5 "I Accoona'd it" (Possibly illegal to admit in several states)
• 4 "I Lycos'd it" (Not to be confused with "I Pecos'd it" from the 1950's...)
• 3 "I Netscaped it" (That's netscaped not netscraped)
• 2 "I AOL'd it" (Roughly analogous to "I screwed it up")

• 1 "I Dogpile'd it" (Imagine Cartman in the "red rocket" scene...)

You may have seen this on some websites before: an ad for a search engine called Dogpile . I don't know about the logging on Dogpile, but it sure delivers search results.

For those still on the Google situation, just block cookies from google or get a plugin that blocks Google from getting your search history logged.

It is every moral persons duty to try to help the non-free. That includes not aiding the regimes that repress their people.

And before this discussion degenerates into WWII analogies, remember that Google is just a damn search engine and what's being repressed are just frigging web pages. No human is being abused or tortured by Google's actions.

An analogy to the cooperation of IBM and the National Socialist party is quite apt.

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

IBM was certainly not doing any abuse or torturing themselves. They were "simply" providing services to a repressive regime. And just so we don't lose track of what China is doing, check these links:

http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/search/web/falun %252Bgong%252Btorture/1/-/1/-/-/-/1//417/top/1

That said, I agree with the underlying sentiment of your post - which basically boils down to "Google is in a position of great power." We all know that, and there are no laws against corporations being in positions of great power. This should not (in and of itself) be a cause for concern, because it is the nature of the market.

In the same vein,the reason Microsoft is such an issue for so many people is assuredly not because they have power. No, if that were the only problem, I would have no concern at all. The problem with Microsoft is that they abuse their power in one sphere to gain an unfair advantage in many other spheres, often stifling innovation (crushing smaller companies) in the process. The examples are numerous - the most obvious is IE's dominance purely due to it's inclusion with Windows.

I do not see this with Google. First off, Google doesn't even have a 50% share of the global searches. So your arguments about it being like Microsoft are premature to say the least. There is no indication that they will ever be a monopoly...it is simply too easy to switch search engines. If Google does something I don't like, switching is as simple as typing "yahoo.com" in the address bar of Firefox I would be very interested to hear any argument from anyone on this site regarding how Google would ever become a monopoly in the search market.

How long before google has to start opening up the algo for us to see or has to stat giving us the option to use some other search engines results?

Well, how about never? Why should Google open up their algorithm? It doesn't matter, the results are the results. If for some reason people believe that they unfairly favor some sites over others and the results are therefore less valid than Yahoo's, MSN's, Ask's or anyone else's, they'll just switch to some other engine. As for Google offering the option to see other engine's results? They already do: it's called DogPile.

Now, Google is in more markets than just search - as you pointed out, they provide free downloadable software. You characterized it as "unfair" for Google to bundle software and release it free. Umm, why? I assume you're referring to RealPlayer, and my reaction is "So what?" RealPlayer was already available free. They're not forcing anyone to download their software...it's not bundled with some other product their selling, and most of all, each piece is available individually. Besides, when installing their bundle, it gives you the option to only install certain parts of the bundle! I'm really not sure where you were going with that argument.

Google is quickly becoming a search monopoly...

Really? I don't see that. I'd like to see evidence anywhere that this is the case. As I said, almost by definition, there will be no search monopoly because the cost of switching is almost zero to the end user. One search engine may one day dominate in the manner of Microsoft with Windows, but the opportunity to abuse that dominance will be very small. The moment people even have the slightest distaste for either the results of their searches or the business practices of the company, they will simply use a competitor. This is clearly not the case with Windows - many people dislike Windows, but they have so much invested in it that it makes it almost impossible to switch for non-geeks, and annoying even for the technically saavy.

• Google recommends: Altavista
• MSN recommends: Search.com
• Yahoo recommends: Yahoo
• Ask.com recommends: Ask.com
• Altavista recommends: Search.com
• Search.com recommends: Dogpile
• Dogpile recommends: Lycos
• Lycos recommends: Ask.com

Nobody at all recommends Google. More proof that Google search is not as good.

Or you could try Teoma (owned by Ask), Exalead (an up and comming French search engine with a number of cool features), GigaBlast (a suprisingly good search built pretty much by one man!) or Wisenut (a search engine owned by Looksmart).

Another good idea is to use one of the Meta search engines. Personally I think Clusty (created by Vivismo) is the best and from your persective has the advantage of not using Google data. Otherwise many people swear by Dogpile (you can switch off Google as a source for results).

Also, many people forget about directories like ODP, which for certain subjects and topics work better than search engines. And whilst on the subject of internet community created resources, more often than not I find the answers I need on good old Wikipedia.

You know it is funny, for a website obsessed with alternative Operating Systems and browsers we don't hear much about alternative ways of finding information. It seems like many people here think the web would impload if Google disappeared. Yeah they are cool and have had some nifty ideas but it is actually suprisingly easy to get by without them.

This is a simple example of metasearch.

For a more complete implementation (which eliminates combined results, etc), you might want to try metacrawler. Dogpile is better known but is exactly the same under the hood, so the one you use probably depends on your UI choice.

I imagine there are a bunch of other metasearch implementations out by now but I happened to do a bit of work on those two back in the day, so I know a little more about them.

I actually like to use http://dogpile.com/ to compare the results from the differnet engines.

I say put it in the ticker (news crawl):

Linux ext3 tweaks - Opus Dei - free porn movies - cosign auto loan - mario - squirting mpeg videos - lighsaber - free amateur husband creampie wife sample videos

(Based on eal dogpile searches)

No, again we bump up against reading comprehensions I think.

"The folks who do the averaging happen to use the arithmetic mean over the field with specific sets of weights"

"rather than, say, the geometric mean "

What he is saying is that the folks who do arithmetic mean and weights, take sample data that is unevenly spread, and attempt to adjust it so as to give a smooth average. I.e they weight the numbers, for example, they take 500 Monitoring stations in NY City, each individual monitoring station has less weight than say the 5 monitoring stations in Provo Utah.

Alternatively one could take an average of the different locals and then use the one average as the local mean temperature.

i.e. there is more than one way to do such a thing.

For the readers at home, doing a search on Geometric Mean shows a host of people using it as perfectly valid science. In fact another term for geometric mean is "Weighted Mean" as in using the arithmetic with weights being equivalent to geometric mean.

gee a lot of math people talking about the benefits of geometric mean
You would find it hard to believe that no one used this convention normally
Geometric means are often useful summaries for highly skewed data

I'll agree that in first year Physics they might only teach one method of averaging, but it is well known, even outside of mathematical circles, that there is more than one way to average a series of complex variable numbers.

Might I suggest, assuming UNSW offers it, that you take some higher Physics courses, and possibly some mathematics courses. I'm sure those will go into these areas in more detail.

Now I know you primarily use Java (spit) but you do use Matlab, I do believe Geometric mean is included within that, maybe you could play around with it a bit.

Don't forget about http://www.dogpile.com/...just don't step in it.....

People specifically try to get a high Pagerank in Google because it it so widely used.

The people that get high pageranks are the people that PAY for them. Big business ends up at the top of the heap and non commercial sites are tossed WAY to the bottom.

I'm not saying that Dogpile is any better but at least it skims over most of the other search engines too.

The days of finding free info and free anything on the internet are done for.
I guess cheapskates like me are doubleplusungood for the e-conomy...

I totally agree, and with so many people around pushing for exeem it almost seem like some thought Suprnova basically equaled BitTorrent. I don't know why people gave the Suprnova shut down (good riddance!) so much notice, and the exeem project equally much. I mean, it was basically just a meta search engine like DogPile, but riddled with ads. It wasn't even a BitTorrent tracker. The world's largest tracker was untouched by the recent actions, and so was a ton of other common torrent sites. That was always better rid of ads and broken links than Suprnova anyway.

How many countries had you invaded by 13? There -IS- a bit of difference there!

Do you seriously think that a 3rd world country sitting on giant fossil fuel repositories run by a mad man were looking for a cleaner more environmentally friendly energy source?

Honestly now, can you sit there with a straight face and tell me that if Saddam had weapons grade uranium he'd try and make electricity out of it?

To see what people are currently searching for live, try Dog Pile Search Spy
Some of the searches can be a little disturbing...

Speaking of conspiracies... Google image search has removed all references to the photographic evidence of war crimes committed by Americans at Abu Ghraib. If you search for Abu Ghraib all that comes back are pictures from outside the prison, none of the pictures of American soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners come up. Compare to results from dogpile. Also, if you search for Lyndie England, you get NOTHING. Compare to results from dogpile.

Speaking of conspiracies... Google image search has removed all references to the photographic evidence of war crimes committed by Americans at Abu Ghraib. If you search for Abu Ghraib all that comes back are pictures from outside the prison, none of the pictures of American soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners come up. Compare to results from dogpile. Also, if you search for Lyndie England, you get NOTHING. Compare to results from dogpile.

Example

They're morons, pure and simple.

"Die Slashdotters" now seems to be a frequent message on the searchspy for Dogpile, where they seem to have gotten their search spying from. Perhaps someone at Dogpile doesn't like the extra traffic? Or maybe someone is just having their browser refresh ever 5 seconds.

I hope the guy's German.

The engadget story page had a link to the Search Spy site. I've been looking at it for a while, and one search string constantly coming up is "die slashdotters". How is this possible?

Or, better yet, the XML feed ...
http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/searchspy/inc/da ta.xml?qcat=web&filter=&ver=2

Why the hell are they using video clips to display this information? Why not, you know, a text file of the search terms? This seemed cool and all, but when I saw that they were using Windows Media Player to do screen capture on a website

the link... http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/searchspy/result s.htm?fci=1?filter=0&qcat=web

If you read the article, you'll see that the search terms come from Search Spy.

Anyone knows another website which doesn't require the embedding of an element of type="application/x-shockwave-flash" ?

...isn't really realized until it goes down. We were researching Linear PCM formats over here when it went down.

I got the error message... "Service Error -27" and immediately though "hm... I wonder what that is," and opened up a new browser window, absentmindedly typing in my query to the Google toolbar...

!@#$!@#$

I laughed for a while, scratched my head, and decided to discuss with my co-workers what the decent "second place" search engine was... Dogpile seemed to be the most common answer. No relevant results, though. Geez, Dogpile is ugly.

Hmm. A Dogpile search didn't give me much. Child Imunization in texas? Doesn't sound like computers to me. I will take it seriously when there are linux kernel and networking packages in GPL and there is a 1000+ page PDF outlining the entire protocol. Untill then, China can keep it.

So I wasn't the only one who couldn't get to Google the Great. Fortunately, Dogpile still worked. I used that meta search engine until Google started getting big and beating all the others in turning up relevant search results.

I wonder if Google will now turn to fully manage all their assets themselves...

What about this? I included "web", "search", "advanced", "preferences" and "images". Do these terms sound familiar to anyone? This is the first result.

Take MetaCrawler and DogPile for instance -- they aren't on his list.

Both DogPile and MetaCrawler are owned by InfoSpace. There may be more than five companies, but not as much diversity as one would think.

Would Google be able to copyright the name Gmail? Looking at this search on dogpile.com we see that there are already freshmeat/sourceforge projects and products out there named "Gmail". Seems like they have been around a lot longer than Google's newly announced service.

Also, Alexa has a snapshot of what Gmail.com recently looked like.

A few sites come to mind.

I quite like Vivisimo (after I figured out how to make it include Google in it's query by adding 'google' to the 'sources=' part of the query URL).

dogpile is also quite good, when you've got it set to display results by relevance rather than by engine.

Remember, Amazon isn't the only online bookstore, ebay isn't the only online auction site and google isn't the only search engine...

Yep-Here and here and here and here

Ahh, go look for yourself:

Here

Microsoft should buy DogPile, since that's what comes to mind when people think Microsoft anyway.