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

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: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:What did we learn...

[sammy baby]

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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:phrase matching

[acceleriter]

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

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. :-)

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

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.

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.