Comments on: Open Thread: Would You Change Search Engines?

By: DobermanBulldog

DobermanBulldog — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:42:04 +0000

Уже который год строю сеюе дачу и в очередной конвульсии что бы такое еще присобачить на место обетованное лажу по инету вдруг вижу ресурс про печи глянул, а там столько инетесного .... поначитался хоть сам печником становись, и вперед на освоение новоприобретенных знаний , рекоммендую!

By: angelaysabelle

angelaysabelle — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:04:50 +0000

I don't use google exclusively for all my searches, 90% maybe. I switched occasionally to Yahoo and Find.com.

By: Owen

Owen — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:38:50 +0000

I rely on accurate and fast research for my living and have done for many more years than search engines have been around. Once google arrived there was finally a search engine that actually worked, but in the past two years it has clearly rested on its laurels and is almost always superseded by Yahoo and about. I now have Yahoo as my default but for any really difficult search I of course use all of them. Frankly Google is actually getting worse, not better. I resent wading through the four or so completely wasted results in the first ten – and yahoo’s new search plugins are actually valuable. Google may be leaping ahead in other areas but they have taken their eye off the ball in their main franchise.

But to answer the question – yes, of course I would. I reevaluate all my tools every few months.

By: colombiancoffee

colombiancoffee — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 01:44:43 +0000

years ago I switched from Google to Dogpile, but eventually, I switched back. I’m now a fan of Google, not just as a search engine, but everything else. It’s been about 5 or 6 years that I never think of anything other than google.

By: Noelle

Noelle — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:14:00 +0000

I did switch to goodsearch last year, (which uses Yahoo,) but I switched back to Google after a while, because I don’t like Yahoo. I would change search engines again if I found a better one than google. Google’s privacy stuff bothers me sometimes.

By: Brent

Brent — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:23:59 +0000

Google provides a lot of APIs which allow for customization. The Cybersearch extension for Firefox uses Google in a very innovative way. That said, I have often wished that Google would provide me with a personal \”exclude this result\” feature for weeding out the spam. One s.e. that shows a lot of promise is Wikia. It lets you rate and annotate results… also offers a toolbar to facilitate this. The downside is that such features entail some work on the user\’s part. Sometimes I don\’t have time for that. But you might want to check it out as a diversion, it can be fun.

By: Ross

Ross — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:44:53 +0000

I use Ask.com because of it’s Ask Eraser, which gives the option of not having your searches recorded on ask.com’s servers. Of course my activity is being recorded in a million other ways, but I feel better not giving yet more information to Google. They already know too much.

By: Mike Gale

Mike Gale — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:02:42 +0000

In some searches things seem worse than they were a few years ago.

Search Engine Optimisation and attempts by site owners to get advertising revenues have contributed to this. (Google’s own dependence on advertising revenue must skew their decisions in ways that mess their results.)

Given all that Google still seems the best for many purposes. (The difficulty would be discovering that something else is actually better for some searches!!)

One of the problems is that catchy wording gives clicks often leading to barren content. Then clicks gives a better rating on the Search Engine. (The curse of PR and SEO is that it often goes with brainlessness.) An unobtrusive way to feedback that content was good would help fix that. (I wouldn’t want any specific company to “own” my feedback though.)

Beyond that any tool that averages the response of anybody whose data has been captured is a road to hell. There are many audiences out there, some will seek a particular type of content others will go out of their way to avoid that same content. A way to go with like minds, and find what I really want, is needed (again without concentrating that information in the hands of any one company or losing control of it).

By: joshnunn

joshnunn — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:40:05 +0000

I won’t switch until another search engine gives me better results. I don’t search for common “britney spears” or “obama” searches, so Cuil et al. who are working to get good results for regular searches are no good to me. I make searches like “ubuntu display blank after suspend” and Google gets me answers where Live, Yahoo and others do not*.

*Actually, this is a bad example – they all have similar results for this particular query, but my point was that Google searches a lot of forums and highly technical places that the others do not.

By: PopGist

PopGist — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:10:55 +0000

Popgist may have potential.