Back when I was a little lad of 15, about 7 years ago, I finally started using the wonderful tool that is called the internet. Not knowing any better, I was a Yahoo man down to my bones.
I signed up for Yahoo mail. I listened to Yahoo radio. I did every search on Yahoo, and I even read all the news and sports on the Yahoo news pages.
In fact until a friend of mine tried to get me to use Alta Vista I hadn't even heard of other search engines. I tried Alta Vista and I didn't like it at all compared to Yahoo. Maybe that's why nothing has really changed. For I am still a Yahoo man. That one journey over to Alta Vista gave me a bad impression on all other search engines.
Skip forward a few years. I had just returned from my mission and had taken a 2 year break from the internet, except email. All of a sudden everyone is talking about Google. It's everywhere! People rave about it. I've done a few searches on it and haven't been too impressed. In fact it seems almost exactly the same as Yahoo.
So someone please tell me what the big deal is. Is Google that much better? Are there still people out there that prefer other engines?
? Posted by hansenj (Member # 4034) on :
Google's pretty universal...I mean it is it's own verb!
Oh and one word for you: gmail Posted by Troubadour (Member # 83) on :
DIdn't Yahoo! use Google for their search enging for a while?
?, I was in your position too - I was the master of Yahoo! search, I could tweak my searches to the Nth degree.... but then I found Google - no-one in my company needs my searching skills anymore, because Google does such a great job of categorisation.
Plus it's just simple, a lot of people like simple.
Plus there's Google image-search. That's awesome. Froogle's not bad either and Google Earth is a mighty thing to behold.
Posted by Narnia (Member # 1071) on :
Yeah, it just seems to be...getting bigger. All the time. You won't be able to escape it for much longer.
And gmail really is better...well, it will be once they get it to work on all operating systems and with all types of firewalls. I can't check it from my school district computer (I'm a teacher) and that sucks.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
For some time, Yahoo used Google. And as the Google interface is cleaner and more powerful, I use Google for all my searches.
Posted by mothertree (Member # 4999) on :
But Google has sold out. I'm back to Alta Vista. If I'm going to get sold, I like to at least know I'm getting sold and not have this pretense of altruism.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
What do you mean by sold out?
Posted by Narnia (Member # 1071) on :
Because they went public?
Posted by Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged (Member # 7476) on :
You do know that Alta Vista is owned by Yahoo? Alta Vista is run by Overture Services, Inc. which is owned by Yahoo.
Posted by Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged (Member # 7476) on :
Alta Vista is just Yahoo! in different clothes
quote:Search results on AltaVista are powered by Yahoo! Search Technology. For fast submission to the Yahoo! Search index via the Overture Site Match(tm) program, Click Here.
Posted by BunnV (Member # 6816) on :
Has anyone tried metasearches? Metasearch sites like "Dogpile.com" retreive serval results using search engines like Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves, etc. and it puts the most relevant results from all the searches in one place. If you want to, you can have it sort it so that it only shows you what results a specific search engine came up with (like you can click "Google" if you want to see only Google results). I learned about this when I took a research workshop at my school library. It's helpful if you're doing a really difficult search and intend on trying several search engines to find what you're looking for.
Personally, I prefer Google search over other search engines since Google seems to get the most hits and most relevant results.
The "cached" option in Google is awesome because it highlights your search keywords so you can quickly scroll to the part of the article that discusses what you're looking for. Google was the first to have this, but other search engines picked up on it as well. Then of course there's "Google Scholar" that specifically searches through scientific peer-reviewed Journal websites and other scientific sites for research articles.
"Google Earth" is pretty popular (I think there's a hatrack thread about this), since you can enter and address and see a satilite image of the location.
Basically most other search engines at some point was powered by or "enhanced" by Google. So if you're using Google you're probably using the latest improvements in searching.
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
I used to use a meta-search program (Dogpile was it). I liked it a lot, until I found Google.
I've used "Ask Jeeves" but mainly find that it's a cumbersome way to get to the same info I'd get from Google.
My current favorite search engine is Copernic. They have a free download search tool for your computer that is just fantastic. I don't really use their web search tool, but the one for your computer works so much better than Windows search and it will, if you ask it to, search the web for you. I just haven't felt the need to try it since Google pretty much meets my needs.
But if you want a great search engine for your computer, get Copernic. It indexes everything on your hard drive, even your e-mail...Excellent.
Since I have a bazillion e-mails, this tool has saved me several times.
Yippee!
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
Copernic was the meta-search program that I used before google was around. But when google showed up (I was a pretty early adopter of it), it by itself was as good as Copernic was, so I dropped Copernic.
Posted by James Tiberius Kirk (Member # 2832) on :
I never used Yahoo! regularly-- back in the old days of AOL, AltaVista was what we used here. Then came Metacrawler, which claimed to search multiple engines at once. It was nice, but they were both really slow. We were still using dial up at the time.
Then Google appeared in Time Magazine. I liked how the page was nice and clean and you didn't have to wait for everything to load up before your search. Wondering if all the hype was true, I typed in some obscure term and the page came up-- instantly.
I have never looked back.
--j_k
Posted by Farmgirl (Member # 5567) on :
I used to be totally AltaVista until Google came along.
Now I use Google for all internet searches, but Copernic for desktop uses.
FG
Posted by Peter Howell (Member # 8072) on :
I like google simply because they aren't complete knobs when it comes to advertising. The nice clean google banner adds are just great. No pop-ups, no obnoxious shockwave garbage, just nice plain text!
Posted by kojabu (Member # 8042) on :
Google sounds cool and they change their google logo if it's a special holiday.
Posted by Beren One Hand (Member # 3403) on :
Last year NPR did a story about how Google was digitizing all the great libraries of the Ivy League schools. I wonder how that's coming along.
Posted by kojabu (Member # 8042) on :
I think they also wanted to do stuff from public libraries, basically anything that doesn't have a copyright.
Posted by Stan the man (Member # 6249) on :
I use Google. Because I am just a thupid mokanick.
Nah, I use it for it's clean interface. It's not as clutttered as Yahoo!.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
The problem Google's having is they want to do a bunch of stuff that is under copyright.
Posted by twinky (Member # 693) on :
I mostly use Google, but I also periodically use Metacrawler (which searches a bunch of search engines).
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