The Internet: How much does it REALLY know?

[Jackass]

Hi again,

I was just wondering ,what search engine would be best to use as a homepage, because i use Alta Vista, but am unable to find anything when i look for it, it always leads me down roads and paths untill i end up in either a Russian or Swedish website (no joke, that is actually true!)

So i was wondering ,which is the best, i generally search for music and online game related topics, so maybe you could help me out?

I spent 30mins trying to get the U.K. official "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" online game!!

Enough is enough!

P.S. I know about Google, which is very good ,but it's not a very attractive Home page!

Loomer

I used AV for ages and someone said Google and I went bah! then started using it and havent looked back - I lucking fove it. Besides its kindo attractive in a post-modern psuedo-regressive minimalist way (I'll shut up now)

Coyote

I have to say i find www.hotbot.com very good at getting things that some times are not ment to be found

Coyote

---

You try to be smarter,
And I will try to be nicer

moist

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by [Jackass]:


P.S. I know about Google, which is very good ,but it's not a very attractive Home page! </font>

How can you say that man ???
Thats one of the things I really like about Google, I mean what do you want from a search engine ??
A bok to put in your search, and a button that says "GO". Thats what you get!

Google is also handy in that you can set preferances (that are stored in cookies...)
so, say, only show pages that are written in English, which is generally rather accurate.

amp

I've been using AV for years, and you can configure it only to bring back English language pages.

---

Lunacy Abounds! GLminesweeper RO><ORS!
art is everything and of course nothing and possibly also a sausage

Zee Dude

you could also try http://www.37.com
it uses 37 search engines and can come up with the right answer sometimes.

The Ask Jeeves is also fairly good (IMHO)
http://www.ask.co.uk

Damn but I miss Infoseek it was the best.

[This message has been edited by Zee Dude (edited 19-06-2001).]

Skeptic1

I use Google and Alltheweb. They're fast and have good coverage.

fisty

i've found that search engines generally spit back out the same stuff - don't they all just work off the same spider premise and therefore tend to give similar answers to questions

dahamsta

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">i've found that search engines generally spit back out the same stuff - don't they all just work off the same spider premise and therefore tend to give similar answers to questions</font>

Not exactly, no. Many search engines spit out the same results because they're using the same architecture, which is licensed from the bigger engines like Excite and Google. But the engines themselves can be quite different. For example, I find Google brings up more accurate results about 75% of the time. Whereas I find Excite pretty much useless most of the time.

People tend to miss this, especially on Yahoo!, which uses Google for its search engine. It took me a half hour to explain to a client one day that the reason he was doing so well on Yahoo! had nothing to do with Yahoo! itself, but because he was being indexed well on Google! Same goes for the ODP, which is used on a fair portion of sites as the web directory.

adam

Hobbes

The arcane secrets of Hobbes ability to find crap websites.

www.av.com
www.dogpile.com
www.ask.com (and http://w18.an.ask.com/docs/peek/)
www.deja.com

[Jackass]

AND THE WINNER IS:

*Drum role...............................*


GOOGLE!!!

*Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause *

Ya, i have been using google for the past couple of days ,and i have to say, it is ver very good, and the fact that it's "unatractive" is not really bothering me anymore, and i find the "i'm feeling lucky" option very handy too, for a general browse on the net when im bored!!

Thanx guys!

ConUladh

I used to use Altavista but I'm another person who hasn't looked back since moving to Google

No need for it to be your homepage, you can set it up as toolbar in IE :

http://toolbar.google.com/

Snowbat

I'm another recent Google convert, having used AV regularly since its launch.

AV's recent forced auto-redirection from www.altavista.com to www.altavista.ie and the latter's default setting of Search: Ireland was the last straw for me. I see this has now been removed but its too late - I prefer Google.

I find Google is faster, produces a lot more hits on rare/unusual searches, and the Cached feature is really great for those hits that are 404. I also like the highlighting of search terms in the cached pages and the translation function.

moist

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Snowbat:
the Cached feature is really great for those hits that are 404. I also like the highlighting of search terms in the cached pages and the translation function.</font>

The text version of pdf's option is also great.

Hobbes

i don't recommend AV anymore as it will first search in it's list of companies who pay them cash to get put to the front.

So you look for something obscure and you end up with 2 pages of links from Amazon.com.