Favorite Search Engine

[JohnLocke]

Please Share :)

[gator_in_Ontario]

1. google it!!!

You are from PBG? Lordy, there is some brains in my home state! Now I have hope!

[JohnLocke]

2. Where are you from?

[gator_in_Ontario]

3. Born in White City

grew up in Fort Pierce. Probably one of the more unlikely breeding grounds of progressives...lol

[JohnLocke]

4. Heh-heh. Why do you live in Ontario now?

[gator_in_Ontario]

7. Flying under the radar

[JohnLocke]

9. Did you go to UF?

[gator_in_Ontario]

12. Naw

I just love the juxtaposition of the gator and the seminole....
I went to Ohio State...history major

[JohnLocke]

5. Who voted WiseNut?

[SOteric]

6. Google for most things, Dogpile for the truly obscure.

[JohnLocke]

8. Really?

[SOteric]

10. Truly.

[VOX]

15. Yes! I go by this same formula...

And I use the Net most of the day (for work purposes, of course :evingrin:), so there's been ample time to refine the search methodology -- and this is it.

Years ago, I thought Alta vista was the bee's knees, but man, did that one ever take a dive.

[Cuban_Liberal]

11. DogPile

It searches like I think. :)

[Mr.Green93]

13. ask mamma

[Goldom]

14. this is a sad day

when yahoo isn't even listed any more... how google so absurdly beat it out in the last couple years i don't know... but yeah. Yahoo for everything except checking out google bombs :)

[ldoolin]

16. I can't believe Google is still popular.

Google has really gone down the drain lately:

They have delisted a number of worthy personal websites over the past couple of months or relegated them to not coming up on a search.

Ranking parameters which discriminate against personal websites and artifically inflate the rankings of commercial sites that are only out to sell you something. Do a Google search on your favorite movies and rock bands and see what I mean.

Ranking parameters which discriminate against websites that have a no-cacheing command in the HTML header, and artificially rank them lower than websites which don't.

Web and usenet caching policies that are at best blatant copyright infringement and at worst a privacy disaster waiting to happen.

-------------

The problem is, none of the other big names are any better:

Yahoo is still using Google's data although they keep announcing that they are going to stop and use their own. If they ever break away from Google with a good database of websites and a good ranking system, they might be a contender again.

Teoma/Ask Jeeves has horribly out of date links, with the results for any search you do missing sites created within the last few months, and full links of sites which no longer exist. Their ranking parameters however are probably the best out of all the search engines, including Google. If they would allow free website submission (so personal, hobby and non-profit websites could more easily get listed there), and would spider more regularly for broken links and keep them cleared out, they might be a contender.

AltaVista and Lycos? Not even worth mentioning. Very incomplete listings and horrible ranking parameters. Searches turn up websites raking near the top which have nothing to do with what you are searching for. Lycos is far worse than AltaVista in that regard.

The best of a bad lot right now are Dogpile and Webcrawler. Why is anyone still using Google for anything other than to check for Google bombs? They suck nowadays.

[theoceansnerves]

17. teoma

teoma, workin good

[kaitykaity]

18. Thank you, you read my mind.

I'm really starting to HATE Google. It never comes up with what I'm looking for any more. Thanks to the advice in this thread I'll try DogPile, teoma, or WebCrawler as my first shot from now on.