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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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: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

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

[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.

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. :-)

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.

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

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: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.

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!