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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.

In case you haven't noticed, more and more search engines are jumping on the "simpler is better" bandwagon.

I have found favorable results with Wisenut.

The closest thing to what you're talking about is Grub, which is run by Looksmart as a dead-link checker and also feeds to WiseNut. While it doesn't allow you to crawl sites that you don't have control over, it does allow you to crawl your own site.

Personally, I've wanted a Google toolbar that indexes the sites that you surf, and adds additional positive weight to the sites that you linger on. It may not know what you liked there, but it knows that you liked it.

Completely offtopic, but does anyone know of a screensaver on Windows that displays random (or spidered) web pages? I've been looking for an equivalent to the XWindows version for years.

Wisenut's another.

Fun new one to try: Mooter

Try a complex 10 word query instead of a single letter. You'll probably find that the response time is slower.
At least it was the case when I worked for another search engine

WiseNut tries to categorize search results in order to enable you to "drill in" (I know that's probably not a good choice of words if you're searching for "cock"...) according to what category you're after.

Somebody is doing it.

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.

The Grub project is a distributed method of crawling the internet. You download the client and you help Looksmart( their search engine wisenut is pretty good but not the best ) crawl the web.
In my opinion it is better to help contribute your spare bandwith and cpu to help make sure more of the internet is crawled and more frequently instead of something more pie in the sky like SETI. Grub has a more down to earth use. Help make sure all of cyberspace can be crawled.
Download the grub client:
http://www.grub.org/html/downloads.php?PHPSESSID=a a2b3b639ab6f4b92965e132a1418df9

There is a linux version. Get crawling, forget Seti and that distributed.net crap, helping crawl all the internet is more of an attainable goal.

The Grub project is a distributed method of crawling the internet. You download the client and you help Looksmart( their search engine wisenut is pretty good but not the best ) crawl the web.
In my opinion it is better to help contribute your spare bandwith and cpu to help make sure more of the internet is crawled and more frequently instead of something more pie in the sky like SETI. Grub has a more down to earth use. Help make sure all of cyberspace can be crawled.
Download the grub client:
http://www.grub.org/html/downloads.php?PHPSESSID=a a2b3b639ab6f4b92965e132a1418df9

There is a linux version. Get crawling, forget seti, helping crawl all the internet is more of an attainable goal.

The Grub project is a distributed method of crawling the internet. You download the client and you help Looksmart( their search engine wisenut is pretty good but not the best ) crawl the web.
In my opinion it is better to help contribute your spare bandwith and cpu to help make sure more of the internet is crawled and more frequently instead of something more pie in the sky like SETI. Grub has a more down to earth use. Help make sure all of cyberspace can be crawled.
Download the grub client:
http://www.grub.org/html/downloads.php?PHPSESSID=a a2b3b639ab6f4b92965e132a1418df9

There is a linux version. Get crawling, forget seti, helping crawl all the internet is more of an attainable goal.

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.

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

Search engines are being bought up left and right, and the price keeps going up.

Teoma bought by Ask Jeeves ($4M).

Wisenut bought by Looksmart ($9M).

Inktomi bought by Yahoo ($235M).

Ask Jeeves realized its search technology didn't work, and bought Teoma. Looksmart, now a "search placement" provider, realized no one would look at its commercial listings if they didn't give users some non-commercial search content as well. Yahoo seems to have come to the same conclusion, after farming out to google, etc. If they want to make revenue, they seem to have realized that they have to invest in some original technology.

• AllTheWeb
• Google
• Teoma
• WiseNut
• AltaVista

The wisenut search engine tries to do a categorization which is quite helpful with some ambiguous queries.

Raymond

Try a Wisenut search for Ford. Its close to what you describe but seems to miss several categories of Ford.

Northern Light is actually a better search engine than Google for specific info

Bull.

How's this for an obscure query: How many nanoseconds long is a shake?

Try it in Northern Light and be fuddled for a while. Now try Google and WiseNut. You won't even have to follow the hits. The answer is in the summary of the second or third hit. Not bad, IHMO.

alltheweb.com Let's you search the web, ftp files, images, MP3s and Videos. The results are quite good though not as good as in google. It has support for more languages than google and I use it exclusively to search pages written in my native language(which isn't supported in google). Has the best ftp search.

ResearchIndex Nice scientific literature search engine. Lets you search not only documents but also citations. Keeps cached copies of the documents in multiple formats. Can show related documents or other documents viewed by users that viewed the current document.

vivisimo.com Groups the found documents by topics and subtopics. Nice interface and the sudgested topics are quite reasonable.

www.wisenut.com Similar to vivisimo, but vivisimo(IMO) is beter.

www.searchshots.com Lets you see screenshot of the found pages. Too bad has a content filter and the results are not very good.

www.teoma.com Simple interface. Can group the results by their topic.

ditto.com An image search engine.

webshots.com Not exactly an image search engine. But I've had much better luck finding images there than in any image search engine. Requires you to download a program (windows only) that puts the images as a wallpaper.

i read an article in wired (i think) a while ago talking about new generation search engines... the one that really stands out is wisenut, which puts things in nice little catergories - i did a search for 'the matrix' and in addition to a list of links, i got all these catergories and the option to search them: Medical Matrix(2), Matrix Net(4), Astrology Software(3), Matrix Reloaded(3), Matrix Group(3), Dot Matrix(3), Class Matrix(3), Internet Matrix(4), Others(179). google returned basically the same thing, but just as a jumbled mess. i like being able to quickly scan and find the general topic before diving in much better! and it has almost as many pages as google (it only had like a third when i read the article!) - wisenut: 1,495,332,308 / google: 1,610,476,000
while i havn't had much need to search since i'm not in school right now, it has seemed much more helpful doing comparison searches for the hell of it...
chesh

The two pages of this article don't seem to be well-related. The first page looks at google-like search engines - Wisenut and Teoma, while the links in the second page fall into a different category altogether. Lasoo doesn't look like anything more than a glorified yellow pages, CURE looks like any other research database out there, and Vivisimo is the least creative of them all, being nothing more than another Dogpile. The first two look promising, but the others are just the same ideas churned out again.