Searching For Google's Successor

weink writes "A new generation of scrappy search engines is emerging to challenge the dominance of mighty Google . An article at Wired News lists up-and-coming search engines, WiseNut , Teoma , Lasoo , CURE , and Vivisimo . Take a look, and give them a try. But I still say that nothing is better then the almighty Google ."

Comments

Re:Hmm..

[tswinzig]

I hit google specifically LOOKING FOR NEWSGROUP discussions on the topic. Granted, I dont need 50 mirrored copies, but I definitely do want to see newsgroup archives indexed.

See, there's this thing called groups.google.com, and...

AllTheWeb

[Evil Attraction]

Yesterday, I posted a reply telling about a Norwegian company (Fast), which have developed the search engine called AllTheWeb. AllTheWeb seems superior to any other search engine on the net when it comes to the hardware being used, as they are using specially developed hardware for searching through huge amounts of text (and other media).

digitoday.no (Norwegian only) today reported about further enhancements of the AllTheWeb search engine. I have tried to do my best in translating some of the article into English;

- Fast will soon change to a new and improved crawler which will find three times as many web pages. That way, Fast will soon cover the whole Internet.
...
Fast estimates that the web today consists of billions of page, but by removing duplicates and "garbage" the number will decrease dramatically. They estimate that their search engine will cover 1.8 billion web pages before christmas.
...
One of the biggest improvements is the ability to index dynamic pages. Dynamic pages are web pages you can only access by pushing a button, choosing something from a menu, or filling out information in a form.
...

The whole article (in Norwegian) can be read here. I'm not a translator, and my English is pretty bad, so you are warned. :-)

Re:AllTheWeb

[Anonymous Coward]

Your English, as demonstrated by the sample you provided, is better than that of many American high school students. Our colleges have to run the freshmen through a basic grammar & composition class so they can even do their assignments.

**sigh**

I can read English that's a little rough on the edges a heck of a lot better than I can read Norwegian (which might as well be encrypted). I know what it takes to write in a language not one's own and I appreciate your effort.

Re:Google destroyed Deja

[bleeeeck]

Try "Tom Clancy +is +a Red", so "is" and "a" don't get dropped out.

Re:Search Engines We'd Like to See:

[tandr]

heh, you will find yourself in the results listed for "SlashBot" then...

google will soon be a fee based site

[Anonymous Coward]

they need funds to keep their 4000+ linux boxes up and running

this statement says it all...

[bbh]

"Google became a huge Web favorite because it's simple and it works."

Most technologies usually fall down because they become irrelevant or don't do the job anymore. But for the moment, Google works a lot better than most. I don't expect to see Google fall anytime soon, and WiseNut is a pretty stupid name anyway.... (Yahoo, Google, ok maybe that statement was unfair...).

Topclick does not work either.

[Anonymous Coward]

Topclick is a colossal failure of the "to be or not to be" search engine accuracy test: only one of many results in the first page belongs there.

Re:Meta-search

[Anonymous Coward]

Try www.c4.com. It's pretty decent.

Re:One of the great features of Google

[Tackhead]

> Yes, the cache can be invaluable at times. Anyone got any ideas as to how much space Google's cache takes up?

No idea, but I also like their conversion of PDFs to text, and caching of the text.

I also love the cache because I can read sites that are 404'd. Great for digging up old specs on hardware.

Re:Altavista

[Anonymous Coward]

It was great because you could do a search for, say warez and photoshop and not porn and not host:adobe.com and filter by date range so you didn't get all the sites that had been removed due to TOS violations.

~~~

All you noobs out there...

[Tim_F]

Listen up!

Google is one of the greatest places on the internet to find what you are looking for. Instead of going onto IRC, and sounding like a complete tool, spend a little time looking for the information that you need.

RTFM!!

Sure it may be easier to go onto irc.opneprojects.net and ask a question in #debian, but try something else next time. You'll piss off a lot less open sourcers, and save yourself and myslef a lot of time. God knows I hate all the whiny questions.

So in summary: take a little time, and learn a few things through your own effort, before you go taking the easy way out.

Re:One of the great features of Google

[JohnyDog]

allmighty google can be used in almost any task. Oppose goverment ?

Searched the web for child porn. Results 1 - 10 of about 246,000. Search took 0.12 seconds.
Searched the web for god. Results 1 - 10 of about 24,900,000. Search took 0.18 seconds.

Now, who could say internet is full of child porn ?

Re:Hmm..

[wsapplegate]

Then you should use Google Groups, the sequel to DejaNews that looks specifically in newsgroups archives. Maybe the same should be done for mailing-lists archives. But this would force us to do three searches. Well, I really don't know what would be more efficient :-/

Re:One of the great features of Google

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks, dude! I saw naked, but where's petrified?

Re:One of the great features of Google

[hexx]

yeah Boobies!

(mature content filter OFF, and proud of it)

Google has already proven itself

[bartle]

The thing that has most impressed me about Google isn't its technology, but the restraint and good sense they've shown in the Internet community. While every other search engine has tried a go at the portal route, Google has focused on simply being a search engine. They've continued to add features that improve the user's experience at the same time other engines sell their results to the highest bidder.

Some of the most annoying companies in existance came about because they pulled a massive version of bait and switch, they adopted a consumer friendly strategy for the short term but changed when they got big enough to destroy the competition. Google has done remarkably little despite their impressive potential marketing position. Companies like this is where our business should go, it is our power as consumers to make decisions like this.

My point is that if/when something better than Google comes along, you should think twice before changing your homepage. When choosing a company, it's not just who provides the best product in the short term, you have to take into account long term as well.

Re:Google has already proven itself

[kettch]

I like the simplicity too. And apparently so did alta vista. They still have it, although it looks different now, ragingsearch.altavista.com used to look very similar to google. Basically, it looked like all they did was take google's front page and change the logo and the links. Now, it appears they couldn't help themselves, it's got a bunch of stuff more that google now, even though it is a text only engine that you are supposed to be able to use with WAP.

Re:Google has already proven itself

[sacrilicious]

My point is that if/when something better than Google comes along, you should think twice before changing your homepage. When choosing a company, it's not just who provides the best product in the short term, you have to take into account long term as well.

I agree with the above philosophically, but on a practical level I don't know how one could go about trying to divine whether a new service is in the "bait" phase of bait-and-switch or not. Fact is, even the company itself may not know; sometimes the switch comes because the company didn't make it trying to execute Plan A, and Plan B is to sell out to advertisers or some acquisition. Anyone have either logic or heuristics to offer as far as trying to navigate these situations?

Re:Google has already proven itself

[bartle]

Fact is, even the company itself may not know; sometimes the switch comes because the company didn't make it trying to execute Plan A, and Plan B is to sell out to advertisers or some acquisition. Anyone have either logic or heuristics to offer as far as trying to navigate these situations?

You are exactly right. There is no way to know what a company is going to do in the future, the best you can do is try to predict their future actions by looking at their past actions. In my mind Google has maintained an impressive consumer focus and generally done right by their users, this gives them positive points. A new company has no past to judge by, so I can't judge them positively or negatively. But the important thing to note here is that I'm judging both companies on their actions, not what they say. So in the end it doesn't matter what the new company says is in their future, Google still wins my business because they've proven themselves to me.

I brought up this whole line of reasoning because it seems like a lot of Slashdot readers are very anxious to "get ahead" or at least get in on the ground floor of the next big thing. We're riding the technology wave here, we don't want to stick with what's proven, we want to move ahead. It would be a shame to lose a good product just because we were taken in by some marketing hype. It happens enough in the real world, let's hope it doesn't happen here.

Re:Google has already proven itself

[Mike Schiraldi]

Let's not forget the gorgeous simplicity. Remember Dejanews at its worst? The page took a full minute to load. IMDB is still like that. Even Slashdot has pretty heavy HTML.

Meanwhile Google's pages are no more cluttered than absolutely necessary -- even the source is plain and simple.
Yahoo sorta follows this philosophy, but not strongly enough.

Re:Google has already proven itself

[pukeAndCry]

"...you should think twice before changing your homepage."

Change my homepage? Why, my homepage is Slashdot with a Google slashbox on the side!

Re:Altavista

[sdo1]

You mean you can still get your candies there.

-S

Re:Google's sense of humor

[pangloss]

omg that's hilarious. i'd never noticed those choices. here's another:

Elmer Fudd

Re:One of the great features of Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Napster has (had) a bug where the last few bytes of a file weren't sent, and that's where the ID3 info is stored, so as files got swapped around, they got smaller and smaller

Re:Meta-search

[Anonymous Coward]

www.mamma.com?

Re:Google insufficient

[augustz]

And in the screw users over for short-term gain and long term harm department... I mean, where are all the damn pop-ups/pop-unders and rich media ads that will crash my broswer, make the page jerk around like a fat football center, and offer me a "new and improved" experience while they show the same damn add so many times that I twich when I see it.

Re:Grammar gripe!!

[commbat]

It's "than" NOT "then" - this is about the fortieth time I've read this grammatical mistake on /. this week. Did *everyone* here sleep through English class? It's "than", NOT "then"; this is about the... hehehe

Re:Google also celebrates holidays!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, Google is really cool and snazzy. I'm waiting for them to go out of business any day now. That always seems to happen with things I like these days. *sigh*

wisenut? no thanks

[arielb]

it doesn't have a cache (something that I use almost all the time) and also happens to run on Windows.

Why fix something...

[bruns]

Why fix something thats not broke? Frankly, I have yet to find another search engine which gives me the results I want.

Re:One of the great features of Google

[Anonymous Coward]

That's so last year.

http://images.google.com/images?q=zhang+ziyi

There we go, much better.

Google has yet to reach his top...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and already people are looking for a successor. More than 3/4 of the internet-population has never heard of Google, nor uses it. They are more than happy with msn.com or yahoo (see http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/mediametrix.h tml and http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.ht ml) I say forget the so called successors, instead, spread the word of Google. In due time, there will be a successor.

Re:A Question for you, kind Sir...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm. I wonder if your karma will wrap if it goes negative enough.

Interfaces

[TrollMan 5000]

Google has definitely left its mark on the search engine industry. Some of the new engines almost look like Google. Gone are the days of banner ads on the front page.

However, it's the cache that sets Google apart from the rest. Also, he search results are newer, too.

Re:Hmm..

[b0r1s]

How about a search engine that doesn't index 'rpmfind' mirrors and newsgroups so searches for linux related info turn up something more useful than 50 pages of rpmfind entries...

Ok, I agree with the rpmfind mirrors, but I have to disagree on the newsgroup issue. Usually when I'm really stuck on something (ie: Linux SMP box hanging under high network load (which makes backups a real bitch), forcing me to power cycle : flawed APIC handling for the 3c905 ethernet card), I hit google specifically LOOKING FOR NEWSGROUP discussions on the topic. Granted, I dont need 50 mirrored copies, but I definitely do want to see newsgroup archives indexed.

Re:Specialized Searches?

[Jebediah21]

*goes to check out SurfWax*

Re:But are the search engines independent?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a Kook.

Re:Hmm..

[Punto]

I desagree.

Sure, if I'm searching form something like 'how to setup my dvd drive on linux' I want a HOWTO (and I go to yahoo for that), but for more obscure things (like maybe 'how to setup my mpeg decoder card on linux') the newsgroup and mailing list archives are very useful.

That's one of the main features of google for me.

Re:Um, ask slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google isn't that great of a search engine, if you search for goatse the first page is http://www.conhugeco.org/goatse.cx/ which isn't goatse.

Re:But are the search engines independent?

[rustman]

I agree, this is %$*#ed up, I did a search on Wndows, and didn't get the Microsoft home page. Instead I got all these sites about automotive glass and home improvements.

Re:Yahoo

[Anonymous Coward]

that is because Yahoo is using Googles engine

Candidate Roundup

[seizer]

Wisenut - seems to work as well as Google. I like it. Doesn't offer alternative spellings, though, and I can't ever spell Skylarov correctly first time :-) The results are harder to parse visually than Google.

Teoma - needs to crawl a lot more before it becomes a viable alternative. Obviously it can find the easy stuff, but most people (I hope) don't use search engines to find the easy stuff. Results are easy to read, and categories meaningful and well placed. Phrase match is kinda cool, because you get to put back in your common words that Google disallows ("and", "the", etc).

Lasoo - lousy spelling looks terrible, even if it was intentional. Aside from that, what makes this different to Mapquest.com plus a Yellow Pages? I know which I'd rather use.

CURE - this search engine has reached its user limit so I'm not allowed to search. Boy, is that going to be popular :-) Hopefully, that's just a beta feature...

Vivisimo - is a metasearch engine, whatever the FAQ begs you to believe. If you like em, then sure, but speaking personally, they are of no particular use to me.

Google still rocks my world, with cacheing, fast fast oh so fast searching, and relevance that beats the crap out of everything ever. Rock on.

Re:Candidate Roundup

[tm1rules]

Temoa - ...Phrase match is kinda cool, because you get to put back in your common words that Google disallows ("and", "the", etc).

Actually, if you just put a "+" in front of the common word you want to include, google obliges. Teoma also needs the "+".

As for the coolness of phrase match, it's the same as putting search terms in quotes with google. The placement of the checkbox leaves much to be desired. It should be immediately after the text box in the Tab order. The user shouldn't have to tab over several times to tick the check box.

Another interesting one ...

[tajan]

... is Exalead : http://www.exalead.com/cgi/exalead The interface is in french, but it lets you search the web in english. The idea is to offer a choice of keywords to narrow your search whenever the request gets too much answers.

Heh. Google is still tops in my book.

[sinnergy]

google still rules my world.

Lasoo doesn't load

Vivisimo plain sucks. Nasty interface. Long load times.

Wisenut isn't bad, but it certainly isn't good.

Teoma has promise, but the searches tend to take a long time on arcane subjects. No easily accessible advanced search functions.

I won't even begin going into CURE. How dare they slander the 80s dark pop/goth/electronic group with an interface that cheesy. Nix the graphics and bring up the friggin' search box without the glitz.

Thanks, but no thanks, guys.

All I want from a search engine...

[scott1853]

Recent results. Google only seems to be getting updated once every couple months. I know they must be pulling down a lot of data, but every other search engine seems to have more recent information that Google does. Anybody have any actual stats of googles refresh?

Re:All I want from a search engine...

[bleeeeck]

Most of my sites get spidered by Google monthly (or more often). It seems like it takes about 3 - 4 weeks for Google to get the new content into it's database. Here's an example of it on one of my pages that has the date, from Google's cache. The date it was spidered is in the right hand news column.

Re:One of the great features of Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the fact that you can browse a text version of pdf files, like the JINI spec Invaluable when you are using lynx.

Re:I found another feature of google's yesterday

[micje]

So, to find porn, just type "link:www.disney.com"

Speed of search engines

[Anonymous Coward]

I just tried all the search engines listed in the artical, and Google is still the fastest. Just don't use this comment for any scientific research, because all the search engines mentioned in the artical are probably getting /.ed by people like me who just want to see which one is fastest.

Re:Cache, Dmoz directory, PDF, Deja/usenet...

[Relic of the Future]

Amen to that! I work as a cluster consultant here at school. Almost every day someone comes up asking me some information that I know is avialable on some campus website, but I don't remember the address. The schools own search engine is absolutely horrendous, but www.google.com/cmu finds it every time. (And by "CMU's own search engine", I don't mean lycos ;)

Better hardware than Google

[Evil Attraction]

I really like Google. Their search engine is fast, and it covers a lot;

• Cache: Means that we are able to visit a site after it's been slashdotted.
• Relevance: Google's "relevance technology" is great. Find related sites, and find only pages related to your query. :-)
• Not only web pages: Google doesn't only search for web pages, but also PDF files and images. More search engines should have had features like that.

So what's bad about Google? AFAIK, nothing an ordinary user would know of. But their hardware is "wrong". Fast has developed a search engine called AllTheWeb. Their search engine is the best seach engine after Google, but could easily (?) have been the best.

Why? Well. They have developed special hardware to do their search. And it's damn fast (that's where they got the name, I guess). However, the software running on their hardware isn't as good as Google, and I really wonder why...

My conclusion: The software Google is using should have run on AllTheWeb's hardware. That would have been one hell of a search engine.


No I don't like it, either...

Re:At least "google" is spelled correctly.

[Johnny5000]

The first time someone told me about the great new web search "google" I immediately went to my computer, and spelled it correctly, or incorrectly, depending on how you look at it. Because www.googol.com is completely different from www.google.com

-J5K

Not PC

[pogofish]

"Search Engine" is no longer politically correct. We prefer "Exploratory Native American."

Re:At least "google" is spelled correctly.

[Nick Number]

The first time someone told me about the great new web search "google" I immediately went to my computer, and spelled it correctly, or incorrectly, depending on how you look at it. Because www.googol.com is completely different from www.google.com

At least you didn't sit there and type in the hundred zeroes.

I would do it, but the lameness filter doesn't like it.

Re:Hmm..

[commbat]

They need the AltaVista NEAR operator: foo NEAR bar.

Researcher's Search Engine Other than Google

[robbyjo]

is Citeseer. It's popular among researchers since you can directly peek into papers...

Re:Hmm..

[Erasmus Darwin]

A similar problem I've found is that when I'm searching on using 'foo' and 'bar' together (for example, if they're two popular options in a software package), I'll tend to get a lot of hits from mailing list indexes. The page'll generally contain a link to a message about 'foo' and a separate link to a message about 'bar', and will be highly rated from all the other things linking to the index.

Re:Meta-search

[AmigaAvenger]

http://www.metacrawler.com

Search Engine Idea

[AlgUSF]

Right now as we speak, companies are throwing away computers (486, P75, etc.), someone could get all of that computing power for dirt cheap. I propose garbagegoogle.com where they take this untapped source of computing power and make a google-esque website out of it... :-)

Re:Search Engine Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

What you save on equipment you wind up spending on networking and electricity.

A new PIII 1gHz can process information 10 times faster than a P75 but does not use as much electricity. So you decide, 10 P75s (with ten network cards, 10 times to hubs/switchs, 10 times the floor space and 5 times the electricity) or a newer computer.

It is a real shame that older computer equipment can not be reused.

AC Where the cowards hide...

Re:Search Engines We'd Like to See:

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, if you want BootyCall search, just use http://www.mondomole.com. The only true porn image search engine.

Re:All The Web?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fast, less machines, and runs on freebsd. I guess they need 4000 linux boxes to keep up with 400 freebsd boxes :)

Re:Getting smarter

[telbij]

Hmm, well wisenut put both my domains at the top of the list , whereas google only put up one of them :)

Never

[ioman1]

Google will never be beat. They are the example others should follow. Good search results, low advertising and a pleasureable experience.

Another one

[sarcast]

A good search engine for all of you privacy nuts out there is TopClick.com.

They don't use cookies or banner ads or anything like that. The best part is, they parse Google's database of sites, so you pretty much get the same results as you would get on Google. I find that they are even faster than Google most of the time on page loads, but of course I may be biased as a former devel on the site ;)

Re:Getting smarter

[Genoaschild]

Yeah but who really wants to type wisenut.com in every single time you want to search something. The name isn't as catchy or meaningful as google.

Google is multilingual.

[wetdogjp]

Sure, WiseNut can speak a few languages, but Google is still the only search engine with Pig Latin!

Google also celebrates holidays!

[antdude]

Like Christmas, Independence Day, etc. So cool :).

Re:Google's sense of humor

[singpolyma]

You can surf the whole web this way with many more "Dialects" to choose from at rinkworks.com on the Dialectizer.

Re:Cache, Dmoz directory, PDF, Deja/usenet...

[jafac]

what's up wit dat? A technology company that actually "gets it".
who would have thought?

Re:What did we learn...

[sammy baby]

You know that Wired is now owned by Lycos too, right? They were a package deal.

Re:At least "google" is spelled correctly.

[isa-kuruption]

Ahem! We use more credible sources here, sonny! By it's own definition, Google is spelt correctly ;)

Google's disadvantages...

[Anonymous Coward]

...are: 1. CaseINsensitive search 2. No combination like AND OR NOT like on altavista advanced. But besides this, they rule IMHO.

Re:I'm curious to see...

[famillionaire]

Just go to the Google cache of the slashdotted alternative search engines.

Kidding.

Re:Getting smarter

[telbij]

It already surpassed Google's according to the numbers on each page.

How can google be better?

[Anonymous Coward]

how can Google be better than an engine like Altavista when it refuses to provide accurate results to phrase searches? It's good for names and obscure words, but little else.

phrase matching

[dermotfitz]

Does anyone care that Google doesn't allow any phrase matches? I think that sucks. Yahoo has allowed that from way back. Other engines do too. Or am I wrong?

Re:phrase matching

[acceleriter]

Put quotes around the phrase, and prefix noise words with a plus sign, e.g. "number +of +the beast".

Re:phrase matching

[jedwards]

put quotes around the phrase.

Re:phrase matching

[dermotfitz]

now what made me think it didn't work? Perhaps it just a dream.

Cache, Dmoz directory, PDF, Deja/usenet...

[augustz]

People forget that Google has not only managed to put together an excellent search engine, but to add value to it through some really great features (and no I do not mean altavista portal garbage and patent lawsuit value).

Site slashdotted? Hit the cache

Want to see a dmoz.org directory? See it page ranked.

Doing science research? Find the answers in indexed PDF files.

And the list goes on...

Not to mention they do the right thing advertising wise, run on linux. Bring on the upstarts, but they'd better be prepared for a good bit of starting to knock down google.

Re:Cache, Dmoz directory, PDF, Deja/usenet...

[Hard_Code]

Not to mention "similar" and "linked to" pages, the special images search (which is amazingly useful - I just searched for wingtip shoes (of all things) and came up with a whole page of pictures), and the usenet archives (which admittedly isn't back in shape yet).

Re:Cache, Dmoz directory, PDF, Deja/usenet...

[PCM2]

Web Techniques is running an interview this month with Google's director of technology. It's short, but it does give a little bit of insight into how their engine works. Among other things, he says Google's long-term goal is to use native language as its default input method.

Re:Cache, Dmoz directory, PDF, Deja/usenet...

[kisielk]

Not to mention that if IIRC, Google is the only search engine to turn a profit. They have managed to sell their search technology to many businesses world-wide and this has no doubt givn them feedback that they used to improve their search capability.
As Google is actually making money off their operation, they are more likely to keep constantly improving their technology. I believe that this will help keep them in the forefront of the plethora of search engines out there.

Re:Cache, Dmoz directory, PDF, Deja/usenet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's idealism will eventually be its downfall.

You gotta be a dick to get ahead in life.

Re:Cache, Dmoz directory, PDF, Deja/usenet...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think patenting one's key technologies and getting profit from licensing the search engine is very idealistic, at least on the slasdot metric.

Re:Hmm..

[tzanger]

(ie: Linux SMP box hanging under high network load (which makes backups a real bitch), forcing me to power cycle : flawed APIC handling for the 3c905 ethernet card),

Out of curiousity, did you find a fix for this? I think that may be explaining the odd lockup I get on my system that I haven't bene able to pin down...

Re:Hmm..

[rnd()]

those are useful to the newbie who doesn't know that rpmfind exists.

Re:Getting smarter

[Dutchie]

Well yeah wisenut could contend... if it wasn't running on IIS!! We all know how sensitive to worms IIS is, don't we. It would be neat to send a Code Red at wisenut and then reverse some of the search results through the root shell. I can think of ALL sorts of funny reversals/replacements.

Google was most exciting to me...

[Ulwarth]

...because, for once, a company made their way to the top by simply _having a stellar product_. When I first began using it I was shocked by how many orders of magnatude better than any other search engine it was. But to my surprise, everyone else realized it too, to the point that Google now completely dominates the search engine industry.

I do hope these other engines (many of which I've tried, and they ain't bad) offer up some competition, because a monopoly is bad even when the monolopy provider is so good. But in the meantime it's great to finally see a product suceeding so well based entirely upon its merit.

Re:Google was most exciting to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention, they didn't turn their site into yet-another-lame-ass-portal. They also have yet to implement any kind of intrusive advertising that I can see. It's fast, no stupid banner ads and pages of bullshit to slow loads down like Altavista turned into, etc.

Good luck...

[Elkman]

Good luck to these new guys on the block. Maybe they have great ideas, but their timing is off. How many companies are getting venture capital these days? Who's successfully issuing IPOs in the current economy? Unless these companies can prove to investors that they're much better than Google (and AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, et al) and that they're going to get the traffic, investors are just going to shake their heads and go to the next opportunity.

Of course, Google is privately held, so I can't tell if they're profitable or not. At least they're still around, though, and they have an impressive track record.

Re:Good luck...

[Anonymous Coward]

Last thing I heard was that Google was showing a small profit and that they intended to go public within about a year's timeframe - despite the tragic death of most IPO's.

Re:Hmm..

[Winged Cat]

Yet another example of, "The difference between theory and practice is that there is no difference, in theory."

Re:But are the search engines independent?

[marsvin]

If there is a Marlboro homepage, then I can't find it either. Try typing 'marlboro' into altavista and see why I prefer Google; the first page (okay, of a small-ish window) is basically ads for cigarette companies.

I found another feature of google's yesterday

[Sludge]

Google is the center of the Internet for me. It's as important to me as Emacs (almost ...)

Yesterday, I found a new feature that I enjoy. Try typing 'link:' into the Google search. It tells you all the sites that link to that site.

I know if you own the site, you can check it out with an HTTP_REFERER, but that isn't always the case.

Usability of Search Engines

[NewbieSpaz]

I have used many different search engine sites since I began using the internet in 1993. (I know it's not as long as some, maybe most of you) Back then I started with Webcrawler then YAHOO!. After getting easily annoyed with those, I found Altavista, which back then was actually at http://altavista.digital.com. I stuck with AV for a very long time, until I found GOOGLE... Ahhh Goooooogle. What can I say, there's nothing easier, and faster. Plus when I want to do a specific search, I love the option of adding on the /linux or /apple. It makes those 'special' searches that much easier. I'm a Googler for life...

Re:Yahoo

[ncc74656]

I've noticed yahoo's search has been as good as or better than google as of late. Don't give up on are old favorite yaho!

...probably because Yahoo's search is Google. Don't believe me? Try this link, which submits a search to Goog^H^H^H^HYahoo, and see what you get:

http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=Apple+Assembl y+Line

Compare the results to this search submitted to Google:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q= Apple+Assembly+Line

(The first result is one of my pages. I made the rounds of several search engines a little while ago to check the page ranking. Yahoo is using Google's search results more or less unmodified.)

The best successor to Google

[Anonymous Coward]

If it has Altavista.com's accuracy and Google's larger database, it will be a winner. If only Google would fix the problems that cause its searches to give wrong results.

F'in A

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely, and it wasn't very long ago. I remember well when Altavista was my default search tool, and Google was just some pipe dream my nerd friends were talking up.

Well, sure enough, Alta Vista became slower, more commerce-encumbered, and less relevant and sure enough, Google was the new winner. If Google soesn't keep up with the times, staying fast and lean and learning new tricks, it will go the same way. Is this news?

SurfWax

[kanajackson]

Has anyone out there tried SurfWax (http://wwww.surfwax.com)? It allows users to create custom sets of search sources, so you could create an "Outdoors" set and include sources like Outside Magazine, Swell.com, BikeMag, and others. It also offers an interesting information-capturing tool called an InfoCubby. Check it out.

and how many linux newbs...

[metalhed77]

THAT'S IT MAN! I HATE ALL THOSE N00BS in #linuxhelp , wtf they keep bothering me with questions! dude get a life, stop being an ass, and be nice to the newbs. you want MORE people to think linux users are nice than think that they are self righteous assholes who think that anyone that isn't as l33t as them isn't worth a second of their time.

Easiest was to find the best search engine

[zombieking]

Just ask jeeves... Duh.

All The Web?

[Dman33]

Anyone try http://www.alltheweb.com??

I do not know how it stacks up to google but I know that it is pretty darn fast.

Re:All The Web?

[SpinyNorman]

"pretty darn fast" doesn't help if it doesn't have a smart algorithm! I've yet to see anything that manages to return good relevent search hits like google.

The only feature I'd like to see added to Google would be search results within subsections of the web: commercial or non-commercial

There ain't one yet

[r_j_prahad]

Search results for "Google's successor":

AltaVista found no documents matching your query.

Re:One of the great features of Google

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean you read the articles???

Re:One of the great features of Google

[jilles]

you can actually use google to do site searches: just add site:yourdomain to the query. Or use the google toolbar and use the search site button.

You can also include a form on your site that does this for you and google can customize the search results page to match the layout of your site.

Re:One of the great features of Google

[Tackhead]

>http://images.google.com/images?q=natalie+portman

It's a good start, but since we still don't get any hits for...

http://images.google.com/images?q=natalie+portman+ grits

...I gotta wonder, like, what's the point?

Re:Google's sense of humor

[pdwalker]

We should petition them for including new languages.

Yoda-speak anyone?

Funny, it would be.

Re:Hmm..

[renderhead]

From Google's About page:

Not only do Google's results contain all of your search terms, but Google also analyzes the proximity of those terms within the page. Google prioritizes results according to how closely your individual search terms appear and favors results that have your search terms near each other. Because of this, the result is much more likely to be relevant to your query.

So it sounds like theoretically the NEAR operator should be unnecessary.

What did we learn...

[Lothar 0]

When another company plucks away Wired's pride and joy, they advertise the competition.

Re:One of the great features of Google

[dboyles]

http://images.google.com/images?q=natalie+portman

'nuff said.

bring back my deja to me ...bring back bring back

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has really tossed the cookies and lost the bar on the Deja thing. I depended on that baby, and they haven't lived up to what they should do with it (like make it work, hierchal threads, view next button--how hard is that!!!)

-----
My WordNature is Daft

Wisenut Runs Windows 2000

[Anonymous Coward]

And also, look at the 'who' page!
They are a bunch of gooks!

Re:Wisenut Runs Windows 2000

[Anonymous Coward]

This is offensive

If it's better than Google

[BigGar']

Then it can only be called: Google-Plex

Solving the keyword problem

[EvlG]

Has any of these manages to solve the keyword problem yet? That is, if you can't think of the keyword that everyone else uses to describe the topic you are looking for, then you will have a very difficult time looking for that information.

Even with Google, I find that my keywords don't always match what the indexed sites use. Often it takes three or four tries to get the right keywords that will get me useful information.

Teoma sounds promising, since getting one site in a topic group can get you more in that topic group.

Re:Altavista

[MagerValp]

Heh, I remember when webcrawler was new and cool and Yahoo was hosted on a .edu address. Kinda weird that it's ancient history now...

I'm feeling lucky

[GregGardner]

And don't forget the infamous "I'm feeling lucky" button. All the fun and odds of a Vegas slot machine without the cost.

Re:Altavista

[cybrthng]

hell, i remember when "webcrawler" was the shiznat. anyone remember when "smarties.com" was the first porn site? now you can get your candies there

Re:Index Size

[Big Brass Balls]

Maybe it h4x0r3d Google and indexed all of its pages, along with a bunch of junk pages...

Re:One of the great features of Google

[NonSequor]

It would really help if everyone set the ID3 tags in their MP3s correctly. I don't think a single MP3 that I got off of Napster had all of the information correctly set (many didn't have any correctly set).

But are the search engines independent?

[Oestergaard]

Would any of the new search engines be controlled by a different government ?

Since the search-engines are becoming our pointers to information, they do have a lot of control over what information we see. I doesn't matter that some web-server in malaysia has a web page describing the complete meaning of life, the universe and everything, if it's not in the search engines.

If all search engines are controlled by the same government (and yes oh yes, they are controlled) the web suddenly becomes biased.

Try searching for "marlboro" on google. What would you expect ? The marlboro home-page ? Oh, no; we have the Marlboro College, poems, but no tobacco company home page. Coincidence? Well, a search for IRIX gives me the SGI home page, so I think the search engine works as designed - what do you think?

Re:But are the search engines independent?

[ebrandsberg]

Try to find a Marlboro webpage on the Philip Morris web pages (www.philipmorrisusa.com) and I think you will find why there is no link to the Marlboro website--there is none. You can barely find mention of Marlboro on their webpage except as a name on their list of brands. Neat, huh?

Re:But are the search engines independent?

[JohnAsh]

I bet there are a lot of links out there that connects the word "IRIX" and a link to sgi. That's geekstuff, plentiful on the net.

And I guess the number of web pages on the subject of the joys of smoking, complete with links to Marlboro, is very small. Perhaps some sponsorship links here and there.

However, remember when "more evil than satan himself" and other similar phrases made Google to point to Microsoft? They clean up such messes from time to time. But I would say that those are extreme cases.

In short, coincidense, yes I think so.

Re:But are the search engines independent?

[lildogie]

Try searching for "marlboro" on google. What would you expect ? The marlboro home-page ? Oh, no; we have the Marlboro College, poems, but no tobacco company home page. Coincidence?

Well, let's see. Try Yahoo:

11. Discount Marlboro Cigarettes
Description:offers a variety of cigarette brands.
Address:http://www.discount-marlboro-cigarettes. c om/
Category:Business and Economy > Shopping and Services > Hobbies>Smoking

23. Toilet Paper
Description:Marlboro Man comes out of closet!
Roy Rogers/Mr. Rogers same man!
Address:http://www.thetp.com/
Category:Entertainment > Humor > Parody>News

Not much about Marlboro Cigarettes. I stopped looking after 100 hits, then noticed:

• RelatedSearches: marlboro cigarettes, marlboro miles, marlboro miles catalog, marlboro gear, marlboro man

I noticed lots and lots of things Marlboro that were named after one of the many places Marlboro. Didn't you see all of these places?

Maybe you should have picked a different cigarette, say "Newport," "Salem," or "Raleigh?"

Re:But are the search engines independent?

[tswinzig]

Try searching for "marlboro" on google. What would you expect ? The marlboro home-page ? Oh, no; we have the Marlboro College, poems, but no tobacco company home page. Coincidence?

Considering that (a) Marlboro is not a tobacco company but a brand of cigarettes, (b) they do not appear to have an official website, NO I am not surprised by the Google results.

Try searching for Marlboro at other search engines like Altavista and Yahoo, and you will get similar results.

Now try searching for "Philip Morris," the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, and you will find they are the very first link -- just as expected.

Conspiracy theories... how quaint.

Re:But are the search engines independent?

[Oestergaard]

Considering that (a) Marlboro is not a tobacco company but a brand of cigarettes, (b) they do not appear to have an official website, NO I am not surprised by the Google results.

IRIX is a product of SGI. Entering IRIX gives me SGI. Entering Marlboro does not give me Phillip Morris.

Now try searching for "Philip Morris," the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, and you will find they are the very first link -- just as expected.

If they didn't do this - the plot would be too obvious. ;-)

Conspiracy theories... how quaint.

Thank you 8)

Re:But are the search engines independent?

[tswinzig]

IRIX is a product of SGI. Entering IRIX gives me SGI. Entering Marlboro does not give me Phillip Morris.

Contrary to popular belief, Google cannot predict what you expect to appear at the top. It can only present the most highly rated content. And how it decides that is well known -- it gives more weight to URL's that are linked from more places. And the more popular sites carry more weight in their linkage (presumably).

Re:But are the search engines independent?

[garbuck]

I can think of no reason a priori why Marlboro cigarettes should be the first hit returned by your single word query, especially since Philip Morris, unlike a lot of our filty capitalist enterprises, has apparently not taken the trouble to create a special web site for the Marlboro brand.

Try adding "cigarettes" or "tobacco" or "tax free" to your query and you'll get a load of hits for cheap cigarettes. If, as you seem to imply, the American government were trying to censor the search engines, why wouldn't they purge the discounters?

Nevertheless, I agree in principle that it would be nice to have a powerful search engine on the web that is beyond the reach of the US government. Perhaps, you might nominate a venue? Remember, got to have lots of bandwidth and be out of reach of Uncle Sam. So where? Frogland? Krautland? Nope -- they're recovering Nazis there, and they don't want the net pushing them off the wagon. UK? RIP. Australia? Noses too blue down under. China? Afghanistan? Right. Russia? Perhaps, provided they can preserve anarchy while improving bandwidth.

Re:At least "google" is spelled correctly.

[Nick Number]

Er, no it isn't

Lasoo

[PD]

Seems to suck way more than the other engines. If you click on North America, it drops you into some random location that you can't click out of. So, I typed in my city name and clicked exactly on my house. The zoomed in map that came up was about 25 miles off target.

Re:Lasoo

[WeirdKid]

I didn't have this problem. Maybe you clicked twice?

I haven't compared it to google yet, but I'd say Lasoo has its place in my utility belt. After typing in my address, I was able to click on "Bars" and now I know exactly how far my house is from each of the nearest local pubs! The distances are in meters, so I'll have to only drink imported beer and crawl metrically -- which kind of makes sense since I won't be on my feet anyway.

Re:Lasoo

[cybrthng]

Its not a mapping website.. you click where you want to "lasoo" your searches to then when you click on the categories it is specific to the region you lasoo'd.

very simple process actually. I was ablt to quickly figure out when you click it zooms in, so click the "out" button to zoom out to click to another region and then click in or simply type in your street address.

Re:Yahoo

[Derkec]

I believe I read recently that only something like 30% of google's income came from advertising. The rest came from selling it's searching capabilities to other search engines. I know I've read that Yahoo works to maintain there own categories while using Google for its web page matches.

They miss the whole point.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google does kickass, and I'm sure the guys that run it will continue to fine tune things so thaat it improves. But the truth is, we're already approaching the limit of what a search engine can do, and any gains will simply be the last 1/100 of that last percent.

Should we stop trying? No, the need for relevant results hasn't been fulfilled, except in the most minimal ways. But we need to look for new answers. I think that to take this any further, it will mean going client-side. To make results more relevant requires too much cpu power, to aggregate it at the engine website. A client side agent, using google as a starting point, and sifting through the results, spidering through them, makes sense. Don't start whining about traffic increase, the same thing happens now, only it's the person himself doing the spidering.

Also, the entire keyword paradigm is at odds with but the most simplistic search. Sometimes I'm looking for a diagram, or I'm looking to buy aa hard to find part. Some engines, like lycos allow you to search for audio or stills, but it borders on lameness. This needs to be epxanded. You need to be able to tell the engine, "hey I'm just looking for general info" or "hey I want to buy something with these parameters". For instance, the diagrams I look for, they can either be gif/jpeg or ascii art. A decent engine/agent should have no trouble returning results thaat reflect these requirements. Same with the "buying" type search, the electronic parts I'm looking for are not common items, and adding a keyword of "shopping cart" doesn't always cut it. As I see it, there are at least a few different types of searches, that a person might make.

I want to buy this item (or a simlar)
I want to find info (of an encyclopedic nature)
I want to find leads about (I don't quite know what I'm looking for yet)
I want to hear news about...
I want to find this file/software (or a similar one)
I want to be entertained about/with...

These things all lend themselves perfectly to a client-side agent. Those websites that don't bother to tag images properly, and yet the image is just stylized text? An agent has the power to OCR it back to normal, something an engine could never hope to do. Get rid of all the mirrors? Google is better at this than any other engine, but can it compete with an agent that can recognize a text mirror or a html page, or vice versa? Or any of the other nifty little optimizations that aren't even obvious to me at the moment? Sure, there will be problems. I'm not sure Joe AOL being able to accept that a proper search will take longer than it takes for a web page to load, but it still seems like the next killer app to me.

Re:Altavista

[Anonymous Coward]

How about when Lycos indexed all those web pages. Being able to search web pages. Whoa.

Re:A Question for you, kind Sir...

[Anonymous Coward]

you only get moderated down below -1 if you really piss of Taco or expose a slashdot bug (like the onmouseover javascript hrefs a while back). You know... security through censorship.

Will they get the Swedish Chef like Google?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Bork Bork Bork!

Stephen King's death in search engines.

[Anonymous Coward]

The phrase "Stephen King is Dead" returned the following results:

424 hits in Google (most of them erroneous results, it appears)

0 hits in AltaVista

122 results in Teoma.com

They weren't that friendly with me...

[maccallr]

...they didn't want to allow compare-stuff.com to use their results - even though it is definitely not a parasitic meta-search ripoff. In fact, it should take more human traffic to google to see the results (and ads).

I haven't tried them again recently, but I think some of their touchy-feely-friendliness is being lost as they, understandably, become a major player with numerous clients/employees etc. Their exchanges with me were polite but I got the feeling that they didn't take time to deal with the issue properly.

If you think google is sadly lacking from compare-stuff please contact them and ask them nicely to allow robot access.

It's the name

[Captain Pooh]

WiseNut , Teoma , Lasoo , CURE , and Vivisimo
Google has a catchy name..but who's going to say go to Teoma. How do you even pronounce it TEA 0 MA..ok, well that was easy to pronounce.

Re:Google's sense of humor

[Cloud K]

Here's another one... set your language to Elmer Fudd, and scroll down to Czech -
"Czech...wwat's twat? Hwuh?"

Re:my 2 cents

[gupta]

the ones you liked the most (WiseNut, Lasoo) are running on MS Windows. They must be very scalable !

groups.google.com

[Kevbo]

Isn't that what this site is for? I like to be able to choose webpages (which will include howtos, FAQs, etc) from news discussions. Sometimes, as the other posters have said, I tend to know that one type of search will yield better results, and it's nice to have that kind of control.

phrase searching - the 1 bad thing about google

[ferret4]

I love google to bits, but it has one terrible, terrible flaw. Phrase searching on google is pants, especially if you're trying to do exact phrase searching.

Search for, using the quotes,: "the king and i".
Google, trying to be clever, removes "and" and "i" because they are common words. Nothing on The King and I in the top 10.

Force the issue by using '+' signs: "the king +and +i" but its ignoring the 'the', so: "+the +king +and +I" - but no, it still ignores it.

All Google needs is an option to do an exact phrase search. Most search engines use "" marks to enclose exact phrases, but google oddly does not. If the want to stay this way and still allow us to use the utterly vital exact phrase search facility, why not do what http://www.alltheweb.com/ do, and have that as an option next to the search box?

Google is still my number one, but it really needs to sort this glaring oversight out.

Re:phrase searching - the 1 bad thing about google

[Anonymous Coward]

try the advance search page you foolking idiot.

Re:Stephen King, author, dead at 54

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people keep posting this crap? He was no more an american icon than Barney. If you liked hack writers, i suppose a case could be made for you 'missing' him... but your NEXT FIX IS AS CLOSE AS THE NEW VC ANDREWS TRIPE. I only wish I had killed him myself.

Wisenut ignored my robots.txt

[Pasc]

Wisenut continues to spider content that I ask not to be spidered (using my robots.txt). In fact, I have over 200 hits to my site from wisenut.com's spider but NONE of them are to my robots.txt.

Hence, I refuse to use wisenut.

Re:Wisenut ignored my robots.txt

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, I'd refuse to use Wisenut just because it has such a dumb name.

Re:Wisenut ignored my robots.txt

[beme]

Have you told them? Not trying to be a smartass or anything... A couple of years ago I shot off an email to the owner of a spider that was ignoring my robots.txt, and lo and behold a bit later the spider started checking and honoring my robots.txt file. YMMV.

Re:Wisenut ignored my robots.txt

[garbuck]

I have over 200 hits to my site from wisenut.com's spider but NONE of them are to my robots.txt.

Sounds like you need to add &lta href="/robots.txt"&gtRobot Food&lt/a&gt to your homepage. Then I would expect you would see some hits.

What else interesting do you have on yer site?

I'm curious to see...

[ackthpt]

I'm curious to see if any of these new search engines suffer from the /. effect.

Re:Meta-search

[etceteral]

If you've got decently written plug ins, Apple's Sherlock system is still pretty spiffy...

Re:Hmm..

[ahrenritter]

I would prefer that the newsgroup messages not be indexed because it can clutter your results list if that is not what you are looking for. If you know that what you are looking for should be in newsgroups (e.g. it is a question you are looking for the answer to) you could look it up at Google Groups

Why use only 1 search engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Copernic 2001. I search all of them at once!

Re:Why use only 1 search engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Copernic2001 has spyware all the way up the ying-yang in it...

Google getting cluttered!

[bahtama]

I need a new search engine, Google now has like 12 links on the front page, it takes forever to load! :)

But seriously, this is why I love it. You can get right to business when you get there, no hunting for links or buttons. In today's Internet, finding a site that isn't cluttered with "info" boxes, affiliate links and popup/blinking/etc ads is a blessing. And now with this image search I was able to find an image I hadn't seen in years in my first attempt, not too mention way to many pics of our own CmdrTaco

www.alltheweb.com Works for Me

[Nova Express]

I tend to use the Advance Search feature at www.alltheweb.com, as it brings up more hits than Google.

Of course, Google is now the only player in town for Usenet Searches since they bought Deja (and if they're reading this, I want them to bring back Deja's hierarchical nesting features...)

Searching for a Slashclue

[Anonymous Coward]

w-ank writes "Here's a bunch of links with nothing you'd actually want to visit. But you'll post this submission because a bored pundit wrote some off-the-cuff drivel about them. Hurry up and boost that site traffic for me so I can sell some banners!

Re:Altavista

[madcow_ucsb]

heh, I remember when archie/veronica was the shiznit. The good ol' days of using gopher thru my mom's VM/CMS account running on an IBM 3090....

Most of 'em look the same

[Pedrito]

WiseNut, Teoma and Vivisimo all are similar in that they put up pretty relevant categories for some searches. In fact, I'll say they do a better job than Google, from what I saw.

As an example, I did a search on "lisinopril", the generic name for a blood pressure medication I take.

Where as google provided one "category" besides the search results, WiseNut provided 10 relevant categories to further break down my search (ACE Inhibitors, brand names, blood pressure, heart attacks, drug information, etc.

Teoma provided 8 different categories, and vivisimo provided 11 categories and "more" option for more categories.

Personally, I find this to be a nice feature of all three of these engines. As for relevancy of the information, that's really a hard thing to quanitify.

Given the choice, though, I'm going to add WiseNut and Teoma to my list of search engines that I use. Beyond the features mentioned above, they took one good idea from Google and that's to keep the search screen sparse and uncluttered.

Just my humble opinion...

Re:Most of 'em look the same

[cmeans]

Northern Light my personal favorite, seemed to do well on the "lisinopril" search as well.

Google's sense of humor

[Alex Kalita]

If you get bored, check out some of the languages you can select on Google's preferences page.

31337 H4x0r g00g13
Google in the language of "Bork, bork bork!"
Igpay Atinlay Ooglegay

Re:Google's sense of humor

[tdanner]

Whoops! Bad cache! That's actually supposed to work correctly. There's a standard for web sites to signal which of the request headers affect the returned page. In this case, the Language request header does. Google supports this standard fully. Your proxy cache apparently doesn't, though!

Re:Google's sense of humor

[KFury]

The best part is when you follow the 'igpay atinlay' link to the prefs page, pull the language pulldown menu, and see that one of the language options is "Orkbay!, Orkbay!, Orkbay!"

Re:Google's sense of humor

[Hal_9000@!!!@]

You forgot Elmer Fudd. but oh well...

To me this really shows the personality behind Google. They are a company of friendly, caring people, which is apparent just by looking at All About Google, or looking at the story of one of their staff taking a bike trip.

Google is a company with culture, a web site with a personality and a huge Linux cluster that they show off to the world. IMHO, Google's corporate personality has helped make it the best. That personality is what keeps the staff working, coming up with new ideas and technologies that push the web forward.

I don't see that on any of these new engines, and I think that that will in some ways dig their graves, just as Altavista's selloff did. Remember when it was altavista.digital.com? Remember feeling that there were people behind that site who cared less about how much money AltaVista was making and more about improving search technology? Then it turned into its own enterprise, no longer Digital's expariment. When it became a garbage portal, it lost that wholesome goodness that it once had. RIP, AltaVista. Congrats Google, live long and prosper.

Re:Google's sense of humor

[rgmoore]

And when you choose "hacker" as your language, you can then select "!c3L4]\[[}!(" or "b0r|< b0r|< b0r|<". Not to mention all the times they change their front page for holidays. Somebody there definitely has a sense of humor and, equally importantly, isn't afraid to let the world know.

Re:Google's sense of humor

[honkycat]

I think the best part is that, thanks to my company's caching proxy, the next person to use google after me inherits my language setting unless they do an explicit page refresh... so people get pig latin and don't know why!

Re:Google's sense of humor

[Polo]

don't forget the special searches:

Google Linux search
Google BSD search
Google iMac colors search

idealism...when it's convenient

[noahm]

You know, for a group that generally claims to be against software patents, the slashdot crowd seems surprisingly willing to overlook the fact that Google makes rather extensive use of them. I find this disappointing. I like Google, and I think they're really the best search engine available right now, but I feel just a little bit dirty every time I use them.

noah

The best thing about Google...

[arban]

What make Google so great is the fact that "google" just rolls off the tongue. Say it with me ... "goooogle".

Vivisimo is a bit hard to pronounce (and I almost spelled Visio).

[accent=British] "Teoma". That's a tinny word, don't you think?[accent off]

In all seriousness, naming choice is very important as you all know. If you can't remeber the address, you won't go there. And don't say anything about bookmarks. I usually type in the URL of the sites I visit often.

Re:Altavista

[al_d]

At a company I used to work at, someone noticed that when searching for the company's name on Altavista, my personal web pages were returned as the first hits- seemed I'd added some personal details in the META tags, which were causing it to be ranked much higher. This still happens with Altavista, even though I don't work there anymore :) Google, of course, ranks me somewhere on the 5th page where I belong.

Um, ask slashdot?

[JohnTheFisherman]

Most people don't use Google anyways, they just go straight to Ask Slashdot. :(

W.H.A.T.

[basking2]

The College of New Jersey and Villanova University are working on a search engine called W.H.A.T. which uses AI to apply contexts to search results. The idea is that the user can express some how more than words do, the meaning of the target. Pretty interesting stuff.
I'm biased as I worked on it for a year, though. :-)

no successor yet

[embobo]

No viable successor yet.

Re: Altavista had this years ago

[Titney]

Not to rain on the google parade or anything but altavista had this feature years ago.

how 'bout SurfWax

[Manjepe]

i found http://www.surfwax.com in searchenginewatch. it lets you build personal metasearch sets of sources you select - essentially you get to pick what sources you use for your search. it has information capturing apparatus (infocubby) that is really good for web research.

Search Engines We'd Like to See:

[Bonker]

SpammerQuery - The home addresses and personal phone numbers of spammers.

EinsteinExpress - When you absolutely, positively have to have next month's kernal patch yesterday...

SlashBot - The home addresses and personal phone numbers of FP'ers and goatse.cx linkers.

BootyCall - All porn all the ti... wait a second. We've got images.google.com for that! Sorry, my bad.

How do these belong in the same article?

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

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.

Re:One of the great features of Google

[al_d]

Yes, the cache can be invaluable at times. Anyone got any ideas as to how much space Google's cache takes up?

As much as I like google

[MeowMeow Jones]

Things just haven't been the same since they started taking advertisers money. They've been shamelessly manipulating search results instead of keeping the engine honest.

Teoma discussed earlier on /. interesting article

[hillct]

Teoma was discussed earlier on /.. The article featured in that posting was quite interesting in it's own right and worth a close read, even if you don't go through the comments of the earlier post.

--CTH

here you go

[Anonymous Coward]

from someone who has too much time on their hands:

http://www.1000000000000000000000000000000000000 00 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000.com/

That has to be a record...

[DrkDruid]

No comments when i load the page... 8 when I click read more... wooo

At least "google" is spelled correctly.

[Jeremiah]

"Lasoo" is not quite a word.

Altavista

[ender_wiggins]

I remember when Altavista was the shiznit!

Re:Altavista

[Oztun]

Oh yeah well... I remember when all we had was a stone carving.

Re:Altavista

[Chundra]

I remember when the McHenry BBS was the first porn site. Ahhh the days of phreak bbsing.

Re:Altavista

[Lxy]

Payola killed the search engine. Yahoo use payola since the get-go (or shortly after) and it was quickly discovered that they sucked. Now all the other search engines have admitted to it, and Google came out a true winner. Now companies want a piece of Google, just as they wanted a piece of Altavista. I just hope Google doesn't become what Altavista is now.

Re:Hmm..

[Faux_Pseudo]

Emacs has a differant way of releasing new versions than most OSS projects. Go read some of the threads in gnu.emacs.help about the release of v21 in order to see how it all works. The source has not been released yet. But a small group of developers have it. I did eventualy find it but it took finding one of them to get it.

Re:Yahoo

[aCC]

Do a search on Yahoo.

First picture on the result page says:

"Yahoo! Powered by Google"
or for "www.yahoo.fr": "Yahoo! Résultants avec Google"

Duh.

Index Size

[Itrebax]

According to Wisenut's front page, it has more pages indexed than Google. Can this be true?

Re:Index Size

[glitch!]

According to Wisenut's front page, it has more pages indexed than Google. Can this be true?

Yes, but they are all "default.ida"...

my 2 cents

[pjgunst]

I just tried them all out, here are my 2 cents.
1) They all try to distinguish themselves by stating "we're not just another search engine...". Basically, they are.
2) Wisenut is by far the least bloated, and it shows in terms of speed.
3) Lasoo combines "white pages" with a web directory. Clever, but putting it all on one page is a bit overkill IMHO.
4) None of them is as configurable as google.

However, it will be nice to see how they develop. They all need an innovative feature though, something to make the switch from google worthwhile.

One thing

[MSBob]

But I still say that nothing is better then the almighty Google

then
adv.
At that time: I was still in school then. Come at noon; I'll be ready then. Next in time, space, or order; immediately afterward: watched the late movie and then went to bed.
In addition; moreover; besides: It costs $20, and then there's the sales tax to pay.
Used after but to qualify or balance a preceding statement: The star was nervous, but then who isn't on the first night of a new play.
In that case; accordingly: If traffic is heavy, then allow extra time.
As a consequence; therefore: The case, then, is closed.

n. That time or moment: The bus leaves at four; until then let's walk.

adj. Being so at that time: the then chairman of the board.

than
conj.
Used after a comparative adjective or adverb to introduce the second element or clause of an unequal comparison: She is a better athlete than I.
Used to introduce the second element after certain words indicating difference: He draws quite differently than she does.
When. Used especially after hardly and scarcely: I had scarcely walked in the door than the commotion started.

WHICH PART OF THE DEFINITION DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? ONCE MORE I SEE THIS SPELLING ERROR ON SLASHDOT I'M GONNA GO FUCKING NUTS!!!!

Re:One thing

[rtaylor]

You give us that comment then use the word 'Gonna' in it. Something is seriously wrong hear :)

Re:One thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Well than, you better get going. :-)

What's the Point of This?

[ras_b]

Why is /. searching for google's successor when it is a damn fine search engine? Is it dead? out of business? What a waste. even the poster of this story says But I still say that nothing is better then the almighty Google . Perhaps there should be a new story: "Searching for Linux's Successor" or "Searching for a new technology/pop culture discussion web site".

Re:One of the great features of Google

[Fishstick]

Yep, gotta agree that google is unmatched for finding relevant content quickly.

I've found that google will find stuff that a site's own search engine won't find at all, or after a long wait.

I've found a lot of times I won't even bother with searching through the site. I go straight to google advanced search to find what I'm looking for from that particular site

for example

search.support.microsoft.com would never be able to return this many KB articles in less than a second (if at all).

Re:Getting smarter

[spiderlog]

I noticed that too...but my search results rarely turned up the same pages (even further down in the results) on wisenut than they did on google. Does their indexing algorithm detail vastly different pages? I'll probably just use this as an alternate if Google can't find my initial results

Re:One of the great features of Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I always wipe out the ID3 tags from my MP3s. Nobody ever has them set right when I get them, and I like my playlist to look exactly how I name my files. [Band] Song.mp3 Perfect.

Things do know...

[ChrisBennett]

What we really want to know is whether these search engines run Apache on Linux?
Are they Beowulf clusters? Do they filter out petrified Natalie Portman and hot grits?
Do they index slashdot properly?
Is the pr0n all indexed?

These are important questions which must be seriously answered before changing search engines.

Re:Hmm..

[b0r1s]

Yep, we bought new network cards.

another workaround (that hits performance, but fixes the problem) is to use the "NOAPIC" option at the boot prompt. Supposedly it's fixed in the alan cox kernel, but it doesnt seem to appear in the linus version's changelogs. it may be fixed in 2.4.8

Specialized Searches?

[Jebediah21]

Do these new search engines have specialized searches for Linux, *BSD, Mac, government, and schools? Until they do Google is #1 for that reason alone.

Re:Specialized Searches?

[Manjepe]

Surfwax allows you to specify sources like mac, gov, linux, and many more for your search. Google is good for quick stuff, I prefer SurfWax for web research.

Re:Usability of Search Engines (DAMNIT!)

[NewbieSpaz]

/apple should be /mac

I always do that, even when actually typing in the URL into Mozilla. Shite.

Google has the magic

[DThorne]

Hey - I know that Google's just a bunch of folks with a great product and attitude, but I swear that they seem to be positively magical about reading my mind. For instance, I live in Canada, where we often get shortchanged with the obvious content bias of our illustrious friends to the south, but man - there's no other engine that gives me the number hits I'm after when I type in a word, like "York", which happens to be a borough in nothern Toronto, but also happens to be part of a name of a sizable little town southeast of us. :)
Other engines give endless New York results, but somehow Google hits home. And that's just a trivial example. I think it's great that there's competition starting up - that's good for all of us - but they have a *long* way to go to catch up with the Mighty G.
And getting that sort of endorsement from all these cynical hackers is impressive enough! :)

D.T.

Yes, recent results are a problem

[WillSeattle]

I too notice that google seems to lack recent results - after changing a few hundred pages drastically, it's kind of painful to see all the old versions pop up in the searches.

Google destroyed Deja

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to be able to search Dejanews. Now almost all of the results from Google's search are incorrect:

Try
"Tom Clancy is a Red"

Ludicrous agitprop? Of course! But Google claims that this sentence is found in more than 100 usenet pages (a quick check of these pages, though, shows that Google lied about the contents: the phrase is not there).

Re:Already!

[ackthpt]

As did CURE

Re:Yahoo

[marsvin]

Uhm... could this be because they *use* Google?

Grammar gripe!!

[dublin]

It's "than" NOT "then" - this is about the fortieth time I've read this grammatical mistake on /. this week. Did *everyone* here sleep through English class?

Re:One of the great features of Google

[jilles]

This style of naming has as a disadvantage that that some OS have path length limits. Also when you burn them to a cd you encounter such limitations. Consequently I prefer to have a directory for each artist and then one for each album of that artist. This way I can strip that information from the filename. The tracknummer is essential for sorting the files in a playlist though so I leave that (and even add it if it is missing).

Google insufficient

[ReelOddeeo]

Google is chronically understaffed in the PHB department.

I'm still waiting....

[Stunt Pope]

for a search engine to allow regular expression searches. Now that would be sweet. (Unless there
is one already?)

Number of Webpages indexed

[msheppard]

I think it's funny how close the indexed page counts are on on Wisenut vs. Google

WiseNut: 1,495,332,308 Web pages and counting!
Google: Search 1,387,529,000 web pages

I also think Wisenut is trying to leverage Google's simplicity... the VERY simple front page with no additional advertising.

Teoma is good

[jchristopher]

If you haven't already tried it, the teoma.com engine is quite nice and has some interesting features. I like how it combines a search engine with an "expert compiled" directory.

Hmm..

[jasno]

How about a search engine that doesn't index 'rpmfind' mirrors and newsgroups so searches for linux related info turn up something more useful than 50 pages of rpmfind entries...

Ok, yeah, I know how to use '-', but its still annoying...

Re:Hmm..

[hendridm]

I agree. Use the right tool for the job. If you want a general topic, like "Web Hosting" or "PC Users Groups in Atlanta area", Yahoo is the best ticket because it offers categorized, accurate hits (plus you can see other stuff in the same category). If you're looking for anything obscure, like "Howto compile MySQL on Solaris", Google is a sure win.

...and the caching is just phenomenal.

Like using the best OS for the job, why not use several search engines to get the best results possible...

Re:Hmm..

[plastik55]

Erm. Google doesn't normally search through newsgroups. It may search through mailing list archives, if the archives are on the web. But Google Groups does not index mailing lists.

Re:Hmm..

[reverius]

Wow... this has got to be the most blatant anti-RMS post I have ever read that didn't even state opinions about Free software and Open Source. :)

Something tells me that Richard Stallman, the original author of GNU Emacs and the champion of Free Software, would object to your use of the word "warez" to describe Free software of any kind. Ever.

I don't understand how it can be "unreleased". Did somebody release the source code? Is it part of the dev tree? A CVS snapshot? Seems to me that it could not possibly qualify as "warez" or even "unreleased".

If it's on the web, then it's released.

If it's Free software, it's not warez.

Right?

Re:Hmm..

[Faux_Pseudo]

I have delt with this problem a number of times.
Try searching for a "warez"* copy of gnu emacs 21.
You will get a million newsgroup mirrors. you will get thousands of results for emacs 20 that happen to have "21" in the url.
to get rid of some of these issues includeing rpms it helps if you use the logical nots
foo-bar tar gz -rpm -re -re: -from:
remember that google will only let you include more than 10 words on your search so go down to the bottem search box if you need to an "search within results"
*so named because its not released yet but does exist. Nothing like living in a world where free software is pirated.

you forgot to mention...

[Anonymous Coward]

alltheweb.com, long live alltheweb
google is crap

God?

[unixdown]

The only god I can find is GOOGLE. Who else will actually answer your prayers?

I can see clearly. . .

[foo fighter]

At least they've learned that cluttered "portal" interfaces aren't conducive to actually finding anything.

Getting smarter

[spiderlog]

WiseNut looks like it can be a contender, but until it meets or surpasses Google's index AND adds a cache feature... well, I'll just stick with what works.

Re:Getting smarter

[Anonymous Coward]

WiseNut doesn't seem to be returning anything NEARLY as useful as google. For example, I tried typing in my name and instead of bringing up my home page, it went to some 4 year old usenet posting...

Re:Meta-search

[Ed Avis]

If I had bothered to read the article before posting, I'd have seen that 'Vivisimo' (bad name, guys. bad name) does some metasearch stuff. But not across all the other search engines mentioned.

Yahoo

[Ziegerektum]

I've noticed yahoo's search has been as good as or better than google as of late. Don't give up on are old favorite yaho!

Re:Yahoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe....They got rid of Inktomi and went with Google a while back.

Meta-search

[Ed Avis]

Is there a decent meta-search tool that can run a query through all (or most) of these and collect together the results?

Maybe not on the web (where it might get threatened) but at least a command-line tool or CGI script.

Re:Meta-search

[freaq]

yes, there is, http://dogpile.com/ . i use it when i'm trying to find out about something where i'm not certain which search engine will be most suitable. you can customize the order in which the engines' results are displayed. google (my fave) is not included, wonder why?

i've caught a grem in my sig - terror is imminent!

Re:Meta-search

[jmccay]

There are a couple for windows. I do most of my searching at work. (Unfortunately, on windows machines.) I only use metaengines. For windows there is web Ferret and then there is copernic 2001. I use Copernic 2001 the most because it also let's you filter the results. You can use logical the operators "and", "or", "not", "near", "except" (and not), & "or not". It stores the in a db offline. I found this to be very useful because I can keep several queries for any amount of time.

Re:One of the great features of Google

[jilles]

The cache is a nice gimmick which I've found useful quite a few times, however the main reason I keep returning to google is that I actually find what I need fast. Yesterday I needed some background on C++ templates. I entered the terms "C++ templates tutorial" in the ie google toolbar (that is a great feauture IMHO) and found what I needed at the top of the returned results. 15 seconds later the stuff I needed was on its way to the printer.

That kind of convenience is hard to beat by a general purpose search engine. The story changes if you start using meta information to narrow the search. Google does not do that as far as I know. However, using meta information inevitably narrows the scope of a search engine. Efficient distributed search engines for multimedia are currently emerging. E.g. morpheus actually uses meta information attached to a mp3 allowing for searches for tracks of a particular album, more albums of the same artist and so on.

Problem with Altavista is

[Anonymous Coward]

If I type in a word to search on I can put good money down that the first 20-30 hits are all advertisments.

Likes, Dislikes, Pros, Cons

[ackthpt]

Wisenut
Looks like google without cache, wiseguide provides a nifty preview of categories with matches.

Teoma
Match phrase button handy, no cache

Lasoo
Nice maps, but not a search engine for finding general topics, more geared to finding locations

CURE
Is this a search engine? Hit the user limit so got nowhere.

Vivisimo
The best of the lot. Nice frame layout, organization by category, but lacks ability to jump to page.

Goggle used for Cracking Databases.

[BrookHarty]

I submitted this to /. but it wasnt accepted.

Google catalogs open Administrator websites, and some of those websites have no or weak passwords. I reference google, since it does a good job of treeing websites. Search engines seem to be a good tool for looking for websites with weaknesses.

Example..
If you search on google for "myPHPAdmin" you can find databases without password protection. You can do simple things like SQL queries for Credit Card information or even Drop tables.

Lucky nobody has wrote a trojan that searches google for unprotected databases and drops all tables. Oh wait, maybe they have....

AllTheWeb Has Better Phrase Matching and Images

[xp]

Here are some reasons I dislike Google and like www.alltheweb.com:

1. In Google to search for phrase "Jim is dead" I have to type "+Jim +is +dead". This is unintuitive and annoying. On AllTheWeb I type "Jim is dead" which is natural and intuitive.

2. The image search on AllTheWeb works much better. The interface is much cleaner and much more usable.

3. Google is too mainstream to be cool.

Asim

One of the great features of Google

[jerw134]

Is the cache. Especially for readers of Slashdot, because it allows them to see a site after it has been Slashdotted. From my quick glance at the other sites, none of them had that technology. That is why I will continue to use Google!

Re:One of the great features of Google

[number one duck]

Nice how google has so much nudity cached... second picture in the third row of that search is topless. Heh.

Re:One of the great features of Google

[bigbadwlf]

I think articles on Slashdot should be posted with Google cache links.
Can the Slashdot Effect hamper the Almighty Google???

*evil wringing of hands*

Re:One of the great features of Google

[suqur]

I much prefer to name my mp3s in this format: Artist - Track # - Title.mp3.

The hyphens are just more aesthetically pleasing to me, but the Track # makes it possible to play an album back in the original order of the songs on the CD. I hate getting mp3s with no track defined...

Re:One of the great features of Google

[Electrum]

The google cache only caches the HTML pages, not images or any other embeded objects. HTML is maybe 5-10% of the total bandwidth used for a site (much less if it is a porn site).

Nothing tops google for tech support

[roc_machine]

I work for an ISP and consistently use google to probe error messages and the like. I've tried Vivisimo and Teoma but I find they gave me poor results. I could usually find the answer to a problem within the first page of results on google. I have yet to see another search engine match that.

Already!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, wiseNut seems to suffer already

same here

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my small servers, used as a testbed largely, consists of 90% .htpasswd/.htaccess'd data and a bunch of random documents and books.

Wisenut started showing up in my server logs two or three months ago. They ignored my robots.txt, so I moved all of my data into new directories and passworded the main parent directory so that even if it ignored robots.txt, it couldn't list anything on its site.

I'm still getting searches from their crawler. They send a request at least every 30 seconds and have been doing so for at least ten weeks now and filled my logs with a little over 250,000 requests.

This is just an example of the new "make money at anyone's expense however you have to" mentality. Welcome to the new internet.

Stupid limits!

[Decimal]

My biggest problem with Google is that I'm limited to 10 search words. I usually look for something in this manner: "freeware -shareware -demo -register -trial text editor windows -macintosh -linux download"...

At which point Google politely tells me to f*ck off. It's a real shame that I can't use Google to filter out all the crap I don't want to have to dig through to find what I want.

Vivisimo

[uncledrax]

Actually, I really like how Visisimo lays out the results.. Especially for when you use it to Search Ebay.. groups them nice and neat.. However, the base searching tech is the same as DogPile.. (ie: just grabs it from other engines).

Re:fuck she's ugly

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't say she's ugly. But still... I have to agree with you. What gives?

It was bound to happen...

[s2r]

Since there's a new version of MySQL coming out every few weeks. As of today 3.23.41

Attitude?

[Anonymous Coward]

Input "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11" in both Google and Wisenut and see the difference. Google is #1 INHO because of attitude - an attitude which permeates their way of searching, of presentation, of doing business.

The Best Part of Google

[ArcadeNut]

Is the interface! You don't have to spend 5 minutes searching (no pun intended) for the Edit box to type your search into!

google is going commercial

[Anonymous Coward]

I liked google until I interviewed there. I've never seen a less competent and more arrogant bunch (unless you count sunsoft). (I turned them down after a four day interview process that included writing a strcmp loop on the whiteboard...) Literally a 200 Phd army, marching in 200 directions. I think Eric Schmidt will do well there, just like he turned Novell around. Nothing lasts. Pagerank is nonincremental and slow due to their total ignorance of anything beyond linear algebra, I guess Sergey et. al. probably should have stayed for the *advanced* computer science course before going out to rule the world with their *new* and *patentable* brute force approach to a trivial value propagation problem. They have a crack VP of Engineering too, terrific management etc. also free lunches and weekly "lets lose at hockey to sergey" sessions. Profitable too! If you define investment income as revenue.

Back to the point - cigarettes be damned ;)

[Oestergaard]

Ok, ok, ok

So maybe I don't have hard evidence that google is indeed biased already.

But my initial point stands - are the search engines independent? It's pretty much indisputable (hmm.. indisputable on /.?) that it could indeed be a problem to the credibility of the web if say 99% of the information being returned by search engines is returned from engines controlled by one government.

Centralized control over information (or, pointers to information in this case) is a potential problem.

Am I wrong ?

So, how do we deal with this ? As a regular joe-user there's pretty darn little one can do to prevent this centralization from happening - or ?

Re:Back to the point - cigarettes be damned ;)

[tswinzig]

But my initial point stands - are the search engines independent?

Uhhh... WHICH search engines? There are many. Independent from WHAT? The government? Uhhh, yeah I would say there's a pretty good chance that the American search engines are not in cahoots with the government. Call it a hunch.

it could indeed be a problem to the credibility of the web if say 99% of the information being returned by search engines is returned from engines controlled by one government.

First, the "web" has no credibility, it is not a person or even a single entity like a company.

Second, there would only be a problem if the dominant search engines were in countries without free speech rights. I'll go out on a limb and say the U.S. has one of the better standards of free speech in the world. The dominant search engines like Yahoo, Google, Altavista, etc. are all in the U.S. I don't see any problem with "credibility."

Centralized control over information (or, pointers to information in this case) is a potential problem.

Please explain how there is any centralized control over the search engines? They are all separate entities.

Am I wrong ?

About what? I can't figure out your argument.

So, how do we deal with this ? As a regular joe-user there's pretty darn little one can do to prevent this centralization from happening - or ?

It's pretty simple. The internet is enjoying a free-market economy. You use the search engines that give the best results. The search engine with most users wins. The search engine that returns illegitimate results, if there was such a search engine, would not be popular.

These things can work themselves out in a free market.

Try these google beta pages

[N3P1u5U17r4]

For images: http://images.google.com For usenet news: http://groups.google.com

Why does Google not include certain pages?

[harmonica]

Yes, my pages change very often, and Google cache has versions that are between 7 and 8 weeks old. So the refresh rate of 28 days (as mentioned in that interview someone linked to) doesn't really work out.

I also noticed that one of my pages didn't make it into Google and I'd really like to know why. It's linked from the top page and there is nothing different from the other pages. I linked to a PDF file on that page (also on my site) which also didn't get included. Unfortunately I don't have access_logs, so I cannot tell for sure whether the page got spidered at all. I'd really like to know what I'm doing wrong.

What about other document file formats?

[harmonica]

It's nice that Google includes PDF files, but why don't they read PostScript, Word DOC and all the other document file formats? It seems to be easy to add a couple of import filters...

They could also easily support compressed documents, e. g. pdf.gz or pdf.bz2.

If the import filter really "understands" the file format (if it knows where things are emphasized or in bold, or larger font, not just the result of pdftotext given to the indexer) the quality of the query results could be improved as well. Words in headings or larger font could be regarded as more relevant for a page (in a similar way that words in h1 or h2 are considered more relevant with HTML).

umm

[Anonymous Coward]

did you mean 'better than Google?'

I remember...

[J.C.B.]

...when the library card catalog was the shiznit! Those were the days! You could actually find a desk to work at, because they weren't all filled with those pesky computers.