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Honeymoon Over For Google?
scubacuda writes "Business Week has an article on some of the challenges Google faces as it gains popularity. For a while, things were looking good: unobtrusive ads, a hardware search appliance, and the fact that 'google' has become a verb (like xerox, kleenex, hoover, etc.). Now, Yahoo! has dropped the 'exclusive' part of its contract, Overture won a series of key contracts, Verity has announced a deal to purchase Inktomi's assets, and Y! announced it was buying Inktomi's web-search business. And other engines such as WiseNut, Teoma, and FAST now mimic Google's 'popularity placement technology.'"
Surffast.com is just a meta search engine, the FAST that is meant here is at alltheweb.com.
[What I'd like to know is] whatever happened to Alta Vista. Remember when they ruled the search engine universe?
The relevant history can be found here. AltaVista was probably the single biggest casualty of Google...prior to Google it had the largest index of webpages. But Google did a better job of indexing and presenting the content for people's needs, then the index became the largest on the web. AltaVista lost the race, so much so that most people nowadays have never even heard of AltaVista.
Wrong; the above code causes the query text input box to get focus once the page loads, so you don't have to click it manually to enter a query. A very useful, and common, feature. document.f.q refers to the widget named "q" in the form named "f".
^]:wq!^M
- Absolutely the fastest search, period.
- Relevant results in ~99% of searches (in my experience). Consistently comes up with the most obscure stuff imaginable (and I've checked against other engines)
- Ads look like ads and they're not masqueraded as results (and yeah, everyone's copying that now, whoopi)
- Usenet archive. Heeelooooo!!!
- News meta crawler. Haven't looked at another "portal" since Google News went live.
- Privately held company. No Yahoo-style pressures for revenue.
- The Amazing Browser Toolbar. Also copied by everyone now.
- Excellent site design. Clean, uncluttered, just nice.
- The Zeitgeist (sp?)
- Cool company with a sense of humor.
Wake me up when everyone else (especially "wisenut", which I've never heard about before) gets there.Wrong. A one followed by 100 zeros is a "googol". That was the inspiration for the name "Google", but they intentionally misspelled the name of the number when naming the search engine.
I like Google.ca, the canadian one.
No DMCA takedowns there.
And I am a US resident..
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
There isn't the purpose of the international Googles. It is /not/ trying to assume that you want Australian content. It is trying to comply with whatever laws exist in your country.
For example, some European countries get very uppity if a search returns sites with pro-Nazi content. Those Google pages have to filter out the things that would be illegal for Google to serve in those countries. Likewise, I'm told that internet pornography is banned in Australia. Now I don't know that for a fact, or whatever other laws there are about content censorship in Australia, but you can see where I'm going with this.
The international Googles are not so much to steer you to nationalized content, but rather to allow Google to comply with international laws.
Or, here's a quick link to a Google search of Slashdot Google coverage.
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