Forum Moderators: open
Best Meta Search Engine - Ixquick & Dogpile
Most Webmaster Friendly Winner - Google
Best Specialty Search - Moreover
Hall Of Fame - Yahoo, Open Directory, FindLaw
</quote>
Full story here [e-mediamarketer.com.au]
Onya
Woz
Outstanding Search Service: AltaVista? No way... grabbing short term cash with no regard for impact on their core service deserves an award for stupidity. I go for Goog, with FAST coming up fast
Most Anti-Webmaster: AV surely gives Goog a run for their money on this.
Can't really argue with the rest though.
(debate on Google has been opened in many threads in ye old Google forum - come on in).
On the other hand, Alta is producing highly relevant, clean looking, webmaster friendly, webmaster respectful results. Certainly they have had their monetary problems this year which I agree decreased the quality in the last few months of 2000. I also agree that their problems very early in the year with "too many urls" gave a few vocal people (myself at the time) the feel alta was 'anti webmaster' - I don't think sos. They were mainly anitspam. Those efforts suceeded in spades).
except Alta Vista would get the Most Anti Webmaster
I'd give Google the "K-mart of Search Engines" award (i.e. they'll accept anything)
"Best Research Engine" is Northern Light
And, the "How to Destroy User Loyalty" is what I'd award Yahoo.
Kim Krause
;)
-G
I absolutely agree, and getting better all the time.
1. I used to use A/V for research. Now that they've incorporated LookSmart titles and descriptions into their ranking algo, the results are far less relevant. (LS titles and descriptions are obviously written by illiterates.)
2. Say what you will about Google, they really drill down in a site and serve up a lot of information that other engines never find. And their results are fresher than Fast.
3. Best Metasearch engines - Ixquick and Zworks. Dogpile has become too slow and cluttered.
Thanks for listening. All of my opinions subject to change in the next week depending on what's new in the continuing SE soap opera - 'As The Algo Turns.'
Zworks was my favourite, but lateley the scripting has gone a little wrong with the Looksmart results. I have switched over to Meta Tiger [metatiger.com]. Also good results although the ranking is a little different from Zworks.
Onya
Woz
*LINK ROT*
Google took over for me -- it comes through more often than not, and if I need to dig more, I turn to Northern Light. AV is my third choice, but the first two usually fill the bill.
I find that AV's anti-spam efforts definitely worked against spam (kudos for that) but they also knocked many of the most relevant sites too far down the list. This leaves the "somehwat relevant" sites at the top. It's easier for me to filter out obvious spam when I read down a SERP than it is to filter out "somewhat relevant" pages.
I think AV will get strong relevance back, but right now I find them a frustrating engine for research, and I've drifted away.
Btw....does Greg Burman ever show up here?
Whenever Google gives me more than 4 or 5 pages, I skip right over the first couple pages....click right away to no. 3 or 4.......very little spam down there....lots more relevance (in fact on lots of searches i think relevance can go up as ranking goes down).
Course, that's just me....maybe I'm out to lunch.
On popular, generic terms the results are relatively strong all the way down the page. As the terms gets more complex, the quality results recede towards the top of the page. Less popular combinations return only a few related results at the very top.
There is usually some spam, but it doesn't blend in very well with the best-of-category listings.
