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This isn't anything new really, it's just a level of frustration setting and waiting for Google to come up with an easier way to search than they have at current. It feels like they have stopped dead in the water on search and settled for what they have.
I really didn't even know there could be a faster, more accurate way to search until using that 'other engine' with it's nifty suggestions. They cut search time by multiples and make the actual process much less of an intellectual brain teaser. Instead of figuring out the right keyword combos to get Google to generate the result I want, I could be putting that effort into viewing information I want, or getting back to work.
In alot of ways, Google today is feeling more an engine from the pre-Google days. I sure hope they have something up their sleeve.
True enough, (not)just for fun I often do the Opera supersearch with ATW and Google side by side. With complex queries it's often ATW bringing up the answer faster.
The only gripe I'm having is they don't seem to do the Fast Topics anymore.
Have been complaining some months ago, but never really got an answer as to why.
This is something Google is missing, but AV, Fast, and the other engine have.
The other day I was looking blue widget cases but had a hard time finding what I was looking for. I tried adding multiple words to the phrase to narrow down the results but only ended up with either non-relevant sites or no results at all.
Only when I trawled through results pages after searching "blue widgets", did I find that the widely used phrase was "blue widget containers."
Both Google and Froogle did not help in pointing this out to me.
Now if I go to Vivisimo and search for "blue widget cases", they will display "blue widget containers" in the clustered results column.
I would much rather see clustered results recommendations at labs.google.com than Google Sets and Google Viewer.
Fun time is over fellas, it is time to get serious.
I agree that several of them have much nicer features for doing advanced searches. I don't generally need help coming up with search terms that work, so that really isn't and issue for me, but I imagine it can be for others.
As a webmaster, I am greatly biased towards Google, simply because they are the only ones that seem to condsider my site worth fully indexing. I was completely indexed by the third month with around 2000 pages in google.
Now we are at 6 months, and these are the number of bot visits I have had so far this month
Googlebot (Google) 3616
Inktomi Slurp 1444
Road Runner: The ImageScape Robot 523
Scooter (AltaVista) 344
Fast-Webcrawler (AllTheWeb) 86
Alexa (IA Archiver) 69
Ink discovered my site and started going nuts about 2 days after yahoo bought them. Before that they had 2 of my pages.
AllTheWeb has 54 pages, and so far it looks like they only added 2 more to the pages that they crawled this month. ATW simply does not live up to their name.
I ran some tests between ATW and google on several of the sites that I frequent, that are all content rich and major players in their industry. On sites with less than 100 pages, ATW generally had slightly over half as many pages as google did for the site. On sites that have hundreds, or even thousands of pages, ATW rarely had over 100 of the pages indexed. The only time that they seemed to have much more than that was for the true king of the hill sites like nationalgeographic.com.
It doesn't matter how nice their UI is, if they don't have the content to search.
And as a webmaster, I do take it somewhat personally that they don't seem to consider my site worth deep crawling. I will continue to favor the SE that favors me.
Other se's out there are inovating quietly, but it's all evolutionary and not revolutionary.
...using that 'other engine' with it's nifty suggestions came onto the scene.
Brett, is it that you are afraid we are going to accuse you of spamming your board if you link to (or identify) a valuable resource, or is it that you're afraid to give some of the golden PageRank to this search engine that you say has "nifty features"? I would think that whatever implied endorsement comes from a link would be acceptable and appropriate if not actually desired in this situation.
If things continue in this direction, I don't see how WebmasterWorld can continue to be the board by which all others are measured.
I know this is a rather harsh criticism, but I am increasingly seeing this type of policy being more of a hinderance than a benefit. I'm hoping that the criticism will be constructive.
Well, I didn't want to turn this into a compare and contrast post....
Thats why he didn't post the name. He didn't want to start the debate of a particualr engine having better features. Without putting words in his mouth I believe he just wanted to bring attention to the competition in general catching up to google in many areas.
[edited by: JeremyL at 11:24 pm (utc) on Feb. 17, 2003]
When I am just an ordinary Joe Public searcher, I am starting to get ticked off with being offered sites that have poor relevance (what ever became of word proximity?) and I tend to dust off my arsenal of expletives when I am offered a site with nothing in it.
As a seo person I know there are links in the background that brought about that result.... as a viewer I have no idea why Google thinks I wanted an empty site.
The "links above all else" philosophy has spawned a whole link fabrication cottage industry that is starting to slew some of the results. A poor site with 500 links does not offer the viewer a better outcome than a great site with 5 links.
I now find myself occasionally going to ATW and elsewhere for sanity checks which never used to happen.
This is a pretty good chance to give constructive feedback on improvements--what would regular users like to see?
the index split up into topic-specific engines, or something like Altavista Prisma/Teoma related searches.
If google is tops for search, i want some of the bells and whistles too. You don't have to include them by default, perhaps some cookie work could let you include the things I want.
I've heard some of the "Google Talks" over the years, or seen the videos. One of the tings I tend to find fascinating from a psudeo-vouyeristic standpoint (Yeah -- I watch FOX, sue me. :) are the queries Google gets.
Now where this gets relivent is how the queries relate to their results. Or rather, how the results relate to the queries.
What I wonder if there is some way to use 'successful' historical queries to add relivence to the currently executing query.
For example, If I'm looking for 'big blue widgets' and the SERPS list 5 pages, the first 2 are affiliate pages (lets say they might be a little keyword heavy and content light), the 3rd listing has a page from a blue widget manufacturer. (They 'manufacturer big widgets that are blue') And the last 2 pages are pages from blue widget resellers.
From a discussion standpoint lets presume the manufacturer site has the most information...
Other users who queried 'big blue widgets' may have hit some of the other pages, but tened to 'land' or end on the manufacturer's page.
From that standpoint since poeple's search tends to end on that page, shouldn't that page have more relavance then it does have?
Now the $64,000 question is -- does this scale, and how do you do this? I think I'll leave this to the guys who have to 'joy' of manahing 15,000 servers. :)
For example, a search for "cardinals" would give refinement options of:
cardinals - team
cardinals - bird
cardinals - church
etc.
Sorry for mentioning the name of the search engine if that's not considered ok here. But I think just looking at the feature on Teoma is a lot easier than trying to understand my explanation. :)
Beth
Besides, it would be even more convenient for me if I could press "Get Local" and then be returned sites in the immediate area (higher in the algo) then beyond (lower algo).
When Big G tweaks the algo sufficiently that junk like:
barak20**.org/hermaphrodite-video-clip-free.htm
doesn't show up in the SERP's when someone is searching for a specific youth organization in a specific city, I'll be a happier camper.
On the flip side, and to Big G's credit, ya'll have far less of these stupid lame sites and ya'll don't land them in the top10-20 as frequently as some other folks do.
Just sign me
no fan of sites which gots nuthin better ta do than glom onto some other site's description and key words in hopes of redirecting unsuspecting folks to somewhere they do not wish to be.
Somehow, I don't seems to get the kind of results that I used to get in the earlier days when I use google. Google in order to prevent spamming becomes what it is today although we know spammy sites when we see it, we visit it once and never go back.
Maybe, to prevent webmasters adapting to their algo, they cannot come out clear with us in certain areas. There is alot of grey areas that we have to keep guessing. Who's fault is it? Google or the webmasters?
On the other end, google's index is getting updated very fast I think. Amazingly, warez sites with their trojaned machines gets into the index too using just ips.
kwngian
[edited by: kwngian at 2:18 am (utc) on Feb. 18, 2003]
The 'get local' suggestion is good, perhaps a 'map' type search on the site that would let you navigate your way through the world, by clicking on a map.. and use that info to generate a search term like 'accommodation melbourne australia'.
