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Smarter search without Google: Search engine alternatives
Source: Spiegel
Website: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,624900,00.html
Author: Frank Patalong
Translator: Dr. Marion Stoll
Date: May 18th, 2009
[Brief Tranlation]
This article is about the strength and advantages of different search engines, old ones, new ones, big ones and small ones. All of them can compete easily with Google and/or Wolfram Alpha.
WA was long on promise but short on delivery. It turned out to be the opposite of Google & co: these search engines' knowledge is huge, but not really detailed: WA's knowledge is very, very limited, but therefore it does know nothing very precisely.
WA is definitely not the ultimate search engine - we all have to wait patiently for that. Anyway, there are lots of useful alternatives around that deliver much better results than Google or WA.
There are heaps of search engines available right now. People just forgot about them because of Google's dominance.
Within the first 5 or 6 years of the WWW people used to try new search engines and/or used different ones for different purposes. This habit was changed with the striking success of Google. Since about 10 years Google manages to suppress its competitors.
Nevertheless, there are very intelligent search engines as good as Google. They are just waiting to be rediscovered and to be tried again. However, Google is not the winner in every single country of the world: Baidu, Naver, Seznam or Yandex are the dominant favourites in their home countries, whereas Google has no chance against them. For us, these search engines are no real alternatives because of the language barrier. But there are enough other ones available.
There are different groups: classical crawler-enignes, similar to Google, they are ploughing through the web. There are specialized providers who just look for videos or plough through Wikipedia. There are metacrawler, who search within the results of other search engines and put them in a better structured order. And there are new technical approaches, engines who connect the search with semantics.
It is worthwhile to tour through currently available search engines besides Google, Yahoo & co. It is a rediscovery: The small, unknown, thematically specialized engines meet the needs of the individual user more often, than the generalised ones.
For the original article by Spiegel, please go to http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,624900,00.html.
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