Google offers search from competitors

Links to AltaVista Excite Lycos and Yahoo!

[Ica]

Sorry, wrong information, the links are not new ... please delete this message ....

Message was:
Chances are high that somebody discovered this before me, but I couldn't find a message:

Google now shows links to it's competitors at the end of every serps. I read that at kottke.org.

But why? It stuffs the page. I don't think it's very useful, I think it's more that they would the user to experience how bad the others are ;-)

[edited by: Ica at 12:08 pm (utc) on July 4, 2002]

[Nick_W]

Definately a thumb to nose, waggly fingers job!

Nick

[vitaplease]

Ica:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Its very clever of Google and its good sense of humour.

Google also is avoiding pre-monopolistic accusations by doing this.

"We do not claim to offer the best results or the most complete results, we even offer a choice of results from the competition!".

Shameless self-denigration

With the Google toolbar installed Google can also check if searchers find pages previously un-indexed by Google?

[Brett_Tabke]

Makes me wonder if we will see Toolbar Battles, where one search engine blocks access, or uses some form of obfuscation if a user is using a competitors toolbar.

[Ica]

So, does this mean it is indeed a new feature? Some people at kottke.org stated, that they google shows it already a long time.

Hmmm. Anyway. I would like to know how long it will take until I post a message that is really new ;-)

[bateman_ap]

I seem to remember it being around ever since I have used google (a long time now!)

[dcheney]

I just noticed them in the last day or so. (It was one of the few features of yahoo search that I missed on Google!) I note, however, that the hand off of queries that include accented characters is handled very poorly.

[Brett_Tabke]

They turn them on/off on a random basis. They've been there (like Yahoo and Dmoz before them) since the early days.

[GoogleGuy]

We've had those links at the bottom for quite a while. :)

[vitaplease]

Well, I think Brett's right they've been turned off for me at the moment, no more links to other search engines for me on the bottom of Serp's for quite a while..:)