Posts Tagged ‘google’

Google makes me nevus. Any monopoly makes me nervous. But Google especially. With absence collecting data from the majority of websites I visit, to their privacy policies, relations with China, Gmail, and Mozilla Partnership, it has become THE portal for the internet. I don’t trust them. I bailed out of any web application once acquired by Google, and thinking of moving my blogspot blog to a self hosted one. Perhaps I am a parinoid conspiricy type, but I am no the only one (read Google Watch or better, this Mother Jones article). With that said its an unavoidable evil empire.

However, you don’t have to use Google for ALL your searching needs.

First let me allow Clusty to introduce itself;

Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. This “metasearch” approach helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom.

But what really makes Clusty unique is what happens after you search. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, our search engine groups similar results together into clusters. Clusters help you see your search results by topic so you can zero in on exactly what you’re looking for or discover unexpected relationships between items. When was the last time you went to the third or fourth page of the search results? Rather than scrolling through page after page, the clusters help you find results you may have missed or that were buried deep in the ranked list.

And with a name like Clusty, it’s gotta be good!

From the Clusty webiste

Next, say hellow to Ask.com

Our ExpertRank algorithm provides relevant search results by identifying the most authoritative sites on the Web. With Ask search technology, it’s not just about who’s biggest: it’s about who’s best. Our ExpertRank algorithm goes beyond mere link popularity (which ranks pages based on the sheer volume of links pointing to a particular page) to determine popularity among pages considered to be experts on the topic of your search. This is known as subject-specific popularity. Identifying topics (also known as “clusters”), the experts on those topics, and the popularity of millions of pages amongst those experts — at the exact moment your search query is conducted — requires many additional calculations that other search engines do not perform. The result is world-class relevance that often offers a unique editorial flavor compared to other search engines.

From Ask.com website

Last, but not least is Dogpile.

If you had a choice between a single-person search party, or a search team of half-a-dozen, which would you choose? Yep, us too. Why not put six search engines to work on something in the same time it takes to use one? This is what we call metasearch. Dogpile puts the power all the leading search engines – Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, and Ask – together in one search box to deliver the best combined results. The process is more efficient and yields more relevant results.

Aren’t all search engines pretty much the same? Funny, we thought that too, but they aren’t. In fact, different search engines often return different search results for the same query. Based on everything from how information is arranged on a web page, to what each search engine pinpoints as most relevant, search results can vary widely across each search provider.

Our time is important to us too. So, we had an idea to bring together the Web’s best search engines in one place and deliver the most comprehensive and relevant results, and metasearch was born. The solution is an efficient, single-search-box engine that makes things easier for all of us. Especially when you learn that our special technology removes duplicates and analyzes the results to ensure the best results are always on top of the pile.

From the Dogpile website

In Firefox you can replace the Google search tools with other options. I even go as far as to replace the keyword.URL function in about:config (typed into the address bar).

For Clusty: http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=

For Ask.com: http://www.ask.com/web?q=

For Dogpile: http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/search/web/