When I first started using the web in the pre-Google era, Alta Vista was the search engine I used.  There was also Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite. There’s also the unpleasantly titled Dogpile, and having tested it, it’s appropriately named. There are also meta search engines which aggregate results from a number of different search engines.

When we  survey how people find our pages on Hantsweb, the majority come via Google. HCC also uses Google as the tool for internal searching of both the website and the intranet.

Search engine competition has been making the news frequently over the last few months as new search engines attempt to rival Google’s near monopoly.

First came Wolfram Alpha… its strength is data based and computational information… try typing in your birthday into the search box. It is still in de evopment and has a lot more data capture to do before it becomes useful.

Then there’s the ridiculously named Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to unseat Google. Bing apparently is supposed to suggest the noise made when the correct information is found… say it out loud and you’ll see what I mean.

But there are other search engines which deliver information in a less conventional way. My favourite, Searchme, which showed results as a coverflow of pages sadly closed down in June. Try these Search cube | Viewzi | Kartoo |Ujiko .

Current search engines use a keyword-based approach to indexing web page, however when the keywords have one of more meanings, the results will return all meanings of that keyword. The future is said to be semantic searching, which deals with meaning and therefore ought to provide improved results by using data to ‘disambiguate’ queries and web text…  in the meantime try the next-generation of Google’s web search… it looks the same but underneath it apparently works in a different way. »

rhwebteam

http://rhweb.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/as-long-as-one-keeps-searching-the-answers-come/