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'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

Um, ask slashdot?

[JohnTheFisherman]

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

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!