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Although I tend to use google out of instinct, I actually prefer Gigablast's results in many instances http://www.gigablast.com/

http://www.gigablast.com. It has its own crawler system, its database is bigger than Yahoo's, and it is not doing the self-centricity Google for which Google is increasingly famous. Try it next time you search, you will come up with hits which Google buries or does not have at all.

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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.

I was shorthanding, and I admit I should have known better, because enough people are likely to read any given comment that you should always make them nitpick proof unless you want to be nitpicked. Lesson learned. I still stand by that description because it was meant to describe a worst case scenario, such as a long time heroine user who is already malnourished, trying to stop heroine without any supervision and no tapering off.
  In such a case, the CNS which is used to being suppressed on a day to day basis goes into a state of stimulated hyperactivity, and much like somebody with poor heart condition this can strain the respiratory system, leading to respiratory arrest.
  The point I was making was that unlike the two posters trying to paint the picture that you can't possibly die from stopping an opiate, you actually can in the right circumstances. Also that arrest is not a word reserved for cardiac conditions.
  I end with the words of one John T. Cooper, M.D. "As for opiate withdrawal as a cause of death, the week before I sat down to write this report I autopsied a man who died of "intracerebral hemorrhage." It happened that the man was two or three days into a concerted effort to kick heroin at home. Still, "opiate withdrawal" did not go on the death certificate as a cause of death, but only as a contributing factor. We can't say for sure that he would still be alive this week if he had refrained from trying to withdraw from opiates yet it is a safe bet."
  This quote and more information on the risks of opiate withdrawal at http://gigablast.com/get?d=159095325345.

If you no longer trust Google, the best thing to do would be not use their services.

When it comes to searching, you could always try one of the numerous independent search engines. There's Gigablast, Entireweb, and Mojeek, just to name a few.

Of course, there are numerous other news and email services out there, so you don't have to use GMail.

Maybe time to find a new search engine. Anyone any suggestions?

Gigablast is nice.

I've started using http://gigablast.com/ lately. I find that it's very quick and sassy.

Frankly, I never understood why Java doesn't have any means to store objects on the stack (apart from perceived simplicity).

Having two types of allocations (and parameter passing semantics) makes things more complicated. It's simpler to think of all allocations being heap allocations. However, there are optimizations to automatically use the stack in some of the cases where it's safe (see escape analysis).

The only next improvement I can think of is if it did related searches to the term you searched for, but I'm not sure how you would represent all of that data at once.

Gigablast does something like that. I think I've seen it in other places as well.

BTW, anybody else tired of the Google fanboys?

1 coder and 8 PCs is enough : Gigablast

Gigablast runs on eight desktop machines, each with four 160-GB IDE hard drives, two gigs of RAM, and one 2.6-GHz Intel processor. It can hold up to 320 million Web pages (on 5 TB), handle about 40 queries per second and spider about eight million pages per day. Currently it serves half a million queries per day to various clients, including some meta search engines and some pay-per-click engines.

Me too. Before my page comes up, the page listing me as one of Bethanie's fans comes up. What's up with that? Oh, plus it suggests I search for something other than my name. But, with Google, all is well again.

"there doesn't seem to be a form you can fill in like Google's "advanced search" form."

except of course, for the advanced search form

Have you tried searching, though? Google pulls back more (quantity adn accuracy) than Gigablast for the same terms. For example, search for "larry wall interview" and get 77,300 vs 9,759 . I'm certainly not saying Google doesn't have its share of problems (seems to steadily be declining in quality). And I do like the categories/tags that Gigablast provides, but overall quality I'll give to Google.

They also seem to have a knack for lowering the importance of weblogs, which seems to be a big issue with some people nowadays.

Here's a simple way to get most blogs out of your results in google or any other search engine (personally I use Gigablast as my primary):

Type search query plus "-blog"

Et voila!

Of course it can't help it if some pages are ranked high because they are linked from blogs, but I don't think that anything from the user-side can change that.

My favourite right now is GigaBlast.

It's still smaller than most other search engines, but it's quite fast, has good relevance and it indexes stuff in real time.

Besides, if you don't find what you are looking, you can do the same search with 5 other search engines just by clicking on links at the bottom of the results page.

But what I like with Gigablast is that it's always getting better and I feel like part of something that has potential.

We can still go to GigaBlast, a high performance google-like search engine created by a single person and running on a shoestring budget. It's a really impressive piece of work.

Your take sounds exactly like what Matt Wells, the programmer of the Gigablast search engine said on his rants and raves page.

"Rants & Raves
by Matt Wells

My Take on Looksmart's Grub
Apr 19, 2003

There's been some press about Grub, a program from Looksmart which you install on your machine to help Looksmart spider the web. Looksmart is only using Grub to save on their bandwidth. Essentially Grub just compresses web pages before sending them to Looksmart's indexer thus reducing the bandwidth they have to pay for by a factor of 5 or so. The same thing could be accomplished through a proxy which compresses web pages. Eventually, once the HTTP mime standard for requesting compressed web pages is better supported by web servers, Grub will not be necessary." ....

[Your suppossed take:] "Looksmart is only using Grub to save on their bandwidth. Essentially Grub just compresses web pages before sending them to Looksmart's indexer thus reducing the bandwidth they have to pay for by a factor of 5 or so. The same thing could be accomplished through a proxy which compresses web pages. Eventually, once the HTTP mime standard for requesting compressed web pages is better supported by web servers, Grub will not be necessary."

You have been caught plagiarizing. Dork, you hardly changed a word, nice copy and paste job.

Your take sounds exactly like what Matt Wells, the programmer of the Gigablast search engine said on his rants and raves page.

"Rants & Raves
by Matt Wells

My Take on Looksmart's Grub
Apr 19, 2003

There's been some press about Grub, a program from Looksmart which you install on your machine to help Looksmart spider the web. Looksmart is only using Grub to save on their bandwidth. Essentially Grub just compresses web pages before sending them to Looksmart's indexer thus reducing the bandwidth they have to pay for by a factor of 5 or so. The same thing could be accomplished through a proxy which compresses web pages. Eventually, once the HTTP mime standard for requesting compressed web pages is better supported by web servers, Grub will not be necessary." ....

[Your suppossed take:] "Looksmart is only using Grub to save on their bandwidth. Essentially Grub just compresses web pages before sending them to Looksmart's indexer thus reducing the bandwidth they have to pay for by a factor of 5 or so. The same thing could be accomplished through a proxy which compresses web pages. Eventually, once the HTTP mime standard for requesting compressed web pages is better supported by web servers, Grub will not be necessary."

You have been caught plagiarizing. Dork, you hardly changed a word, nice copy and paste job.

Yeah! It is possible to build an excellent search engine with just one man's power. Check it out at www.gigablast.com.