Other than google.

Google went downhill as soon as they started compromising the search integrity by allowing advertisers to 'leapfrog' to the front of the pageranks. They're somewhat tight-lipped about the whole algorithm thing, but basically the bean-counters have compromised what was originally a decent search engine.

Worth trying one of the new breed of search engine aggregators: Clusty is worth a look, as I find that it can return consistently more relevant search results than Google for the things I'm searching on these days. It's not the prettiest site but it does seem to work.

John

PS. Am I alone in feeling that Google has turned to the dark-side? I've long since stopped trusting them and having had a few business dealings with them (for advertising) I find a lot of their practices somewhat questionable. In my opinion, of course.

You could try this site:

http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm

Google without advertisements. I am sure Google will shut it down at some point.

Google now has shareholders to support and a whole tribe of Wall Street suits to please so is it any wonder this resulted in a trip to the dark-side?

I,d like to know more about a search engine called Opera. Is anyone using it? I believe it is faster thah Google and quite accurate.

An examination of which search engines have sent visitors to seventh-veil.com (they type all sorts of phrases but the most common is "high end speakers") gives the following:

Google: 68.5%
Yahoo: 18.5%
MSN: 7.5%
AOL: 2.1%
Alta Vista: 0.7%
Dogpile: 0.6%
Open Directory: 0.4%

All international versions of the search engines are included here (eg. Google-Italy, Google-UK, etc.)

So, for incomings on my site at least, Google is by far the most important engine. Yahoo, the second most important, also has 'sponsored listings'.

In spite the adverts, these engines are the most popular because they give the most relevant responses to user enquiries. Both Google and Yahoo rank sites, for any particular search phrase, on the basis of the value of the links to those sites for that phrase. All previous methods, such as ranking sites on their declared 'meta-phrases', have proven too easy for sites to cheat on and thus search engine users haven't received relevant listings.

I hope this helps.

Regards
Steve M

You might wish to follow this link and see another view of the big G without the adverts.

Anyone thinking of selling their Google shares at a mega profit now that trading is allowed?

quote:

Both Google and Yahoo rank sites, for any particular search phrase, on the basis of the value of the links to those sites for that phrase.

Not wishing to argue the point, but Google is becoming increasingly spoilt by the intrusion of financially 'enhanced' listings. By that I mean that Google appears to bump advertisers ahead of non-advertisers in the listings. It's getting to the stage that its biases are becoming really blatant. The page-rank system basically is highly flawed. Also, Google doesn't really spider highly dynamic URLs - for instance, something like:

http://www.somedomain.com/index.asp?a=2&b=5&c=7

...is often spidered without the 'querystring' portion. I saw a lot of this in the logfiles for my own site. I had to basically do some URL rewriting which would allow the above example to be related thus:

http://www.somedomain.com/index_2_5_7.htm

(for example; the ISAPI filter recognises the semmingly static htm file request, extracts the necessary data from the URL and 'rewrites' in the asp form).

Since doing this, I've seen Google spider far more of my site. Why tell you all of this? Well, for all Google's supposed 'power', it's basically ignoring large portions of the web. If you can get anything approaching an explanation from them, they'll claim that it's to 'protect' sites from over-spidering, but in reality I think they have another agenda.

These days I have as deep a distrust of Google as I do of Microsoft, as I think Google has turned to the dark-side, and we're just beginning to see some of the nastier stuff rising to the surface. Again, in my opinion.

John

PS. I still reckon it's one of the best search engines, but the company has changed from geek-chic to corporate wh0re...

With this information to hand I did a search and found a nifty upgrade for Safari which allows you to choose any search engine to use in the top right of the bar, I am trying with Yahoo but basically its just google innit? Advert after advert.

I appreciate that the web is full of stuff for sale this is fair enough. What is pissing me off is for instance yesterday I wanted information on the Chinese new year, one of the topper-most search results was 'Buy Chinese new year at great prices on Ebay' I mean common!

Well I tried Garyi's 'chinese new year' test in blinkx using the web search option, but got nearly all advertisments. So that doesn't look like a good alternative.

Nick