Slashdot Mirror
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
."
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...
"And like that
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.
Try "Tom Clancy +is +a Red", so "is" and "a" don't get dropped out.
heh, you will find yourself in the results listed for "SlashBot" then...
"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...).
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.
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 ?
People who like this sort of sig will find this the sort of sig they like.
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 :-/
Xenu brings order!
yeah Boobies!
(mature content filter OFF, and proud of it)
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.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
omg that's hilarious. i'd never noticed those choices. here's another:
Elmer Fudd
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.
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
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
it doesn't have a cache (something that I use almost all the time) and also happens to run on Windows.
---
Why fix something thats not broke? Frankly, I have yet to find another search engine which gives me the results I want.
Brielle
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.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
*goes to check out SurfWax*
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
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.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
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.
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.
:-) Hopefully, that's just a beta feature...
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
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.
... 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.
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.
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?
So, to find porn, just type "link:www.disney.com"
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. - ast
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 ;)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
- 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...
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
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
"Search Engine" is no longer politically correct. We prefer "Exploratory Native American."
A man without a God is like a fish without a bicycle.
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.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
They need the AltaVista NEAR operator: foo NEAR bar.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
is Citeseer. It's popular among researchers since you can directly peek into papers...
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
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.
http://www.metacrawler.com
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... :-)
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Hmm, well wisenut put both my domains at the top of the list , whereas google only put up one of them :)
Google will never be beat. They are the example others should follow. Good search results, low advertising and a pleasureable experience.
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 ;)
Sure, WiseNut can speak a few languages, but Google is still the only search engine with Pig Latin!
Like Christmas, Independence Day, etc. So cool :).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You can surf the whole web this way with many more "Dialects" to choose from at rinkworks.com on the Dialectizer.
- Singpolyma
what's up wit dat? A technology company that actually "gets it".
who would have thought?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You know that Wired is now owned by Lycos too, right? They were a package deal.
Ahem! We use more credible sources here, sonny! By it's own definition, Google is spelt correctly ;)
Just go to the Google cache of the slashdotted alternative search engines.
Kidding.
It already surpassed Google's according to the numbers on each page.
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?
How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure. - Charles Crumb
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.
(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...
those are useful to the newbie who doesn't know that rpmfind exists.
Amazing magic tricks
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.
...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.
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.
Yet another example of, "The difference between theory and practice is that there is no difference, in theory."
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.
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.
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...
------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
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.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
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.
Photos.
Just ask jeeves... Duh.
-----
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
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.
AltaVista found no documents matching your query.
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.
Jilles
It's a good start, but since we still don't get any hits for...
http://images.google.com/images?q=natalie+portman+ grits
We should petition them for including new languages.
Yoda-speak anyone?
Funny, it would be.
So it sounds like theoretically the NEAR operator should be unnecessary.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
When another company plucks away Wired's pride and joy, they advertise the competition.
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
http://images.google.com/images?q=natalie+portman
'nuff said.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Then it can only be called: Google-Plex
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
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.
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...
READY.
#
And don't forget the infamous "I'm feeling lucky" button. All the fun and odds of a Vegas slot machine without the cost.
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
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).
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
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?
Er, no it isn't
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
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.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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.
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.
Bork Bork Bork!
...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.
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.
Here's another one... set your language to Elmer Fudd, and scroll down to Czech -
"Czech...wwat's twat? Hwuh?"
the ones you liked the most (WiseNut, Lasoo) are running on MS Windows. They must be very scalable !
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.
In Vino Veritas
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.
Hence, I refuse to use wisenut.
I'm curious to see if any of these new search engines suffer from the /. effect.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
------------
"...and Maddest of all, to see Life as it Is, and not as it Should Be."
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
All I wanted was a rock to wind a piece of string around, and I ended up with the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota
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
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
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...)
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
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....
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...
31337 H4x0r g00g13
Google in the language of "Bork, bork bork!"
Igpay Atinlay Ooglegay
noah
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.
"You like Chinese food." -Fortune Cookie
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.
Most people don't use Google anyways, they just go straight to Ask Slashdot. :(
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
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.
Sam
No viable successor yet.
Not to rain on the google parade or anything but altavista had this feature years ago.
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.
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.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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.
Last post!
Yes, the cache can be invaluable at times. Anyone got any ideas as to how much space Google's cache takes up?
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.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
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
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
"Lasoo" is not quite a word.
I remember when Altavista was the shiznit!
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.
Ascii artist &
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.
According to Wisenut's front page, it has more pages indexed than Google. Can this be true?
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.
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".
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).
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
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
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
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
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.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
/apple should be /mac
I always do that, even when actually typing in the URL into Mozilla. Shite.
------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
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.
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.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
As did CURE
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Uhm... could this be because they *use* Google?
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?
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
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).
Jilles
Google is chronically understaffed in the PHB department.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
for a search engine to allow regular expression searches. Now that would be sweet. (Unless there
is one already?)
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.
Krispy Cream is people
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.
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...
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
The only god I can find is GOOGLE. Who else will actually answer your prayers?
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.
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.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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!
-zr
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.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
Jilles
You give us that comment then use the word 'Gonna' in it. Something is seriously wrong hear :)
Rod Taylor
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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....
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
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).
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Is the interface! You don't have to spend 5 minutes searching (no pun intended) for the Edit box to type your search into!
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
Ok, ok, ok
/.?) 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.
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
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 ?
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.
"And like that
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.
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).
...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.