De-Googleize Your Search
"Google" has become a synonym for Web search. I have tremendous respect for the way Google revolutionized how we use the Internet, and for its numerous wonderful free products (many of which I use). But "Googling" is an unfortunate usage, because it blinds Web users to additional possibilites, and could prevent them from finding what they are looking for.
We tend to assume that all search engines are basically the same, but it's wrong. Research shows shockingly little overlap in the top search results among the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Windows Live [formerly MSN], and Ask). No single search engine turns up all the links you might want. Even more often, their different ranking algorithms sort the results differently. Most of us rarely go past the first page of results, and almost never past the second or third page, so the ranking logic is crucial to finding what we search for.
An investigation in 2005 (summarized in Search Engine Watch) revealed that in a keyword search on the four leading search engines, 84.9% of the first-page results were unique to one engine. Only 11.4% of the hits appeared on the first pages of two engines, and a scant 2.6% appeared on three first pages. Looked at another way, 66.4% of the Google first-page results were unique to Google; 70.8% of MSN hits were unique to MSN; 71.2% for Yahoo. You can find additional statistics here, and a very recent confirmation of the differences among search engines here.
If I had to choose only one search engine, I would choose Google. But I don't have to choose! Enter the metasearch engine — a search engine that believes two heads are better than one, and three or four or more are better still. A metasearch engine carries out your search on a number of other search engines, and shows you all the results.
My current favorite in metasearch is Dogpile, which seems to poll the widest selection of search engines. (Dogpile sponsored the research summarized above, and offers the full white paper in PDF format, but I don't believe that compromises the actual data.) Other good metasearch engines include Info and Jux2. Some others, such as SurfWax and Ixquick, failed the cut only because they don't include Google. (In researching this blog, I discovered to my disappointment that my previous favorite, Copernic, apparently has outsourced its Web search function to another metasearcher, Mamma, which excludes Google.)
You can search the Web from a metasearch engine's site, or download a browser tool bar for your favorite metasearch engine. I dislike tool bar proliferation, so I simply added a couple of metasearch engines to my search provider drop-down lists in Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.
Try out a few searches in Dogpile or Jux2. These two name the search engines that returned each result (Jux2 also shows you the original rank of each result), and you'll be surprised at how many results came from one and not another search engine. Happy surfing!
Jonathan Plutchok, at various times a lawyer, financial columnist, marketing communicator, and technical writer, reviews and recommends utility software and Web sites at Jonathan’s Tool Bar & Grill.
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Try the metasearch site Zuula, Jonathan. It does metasearch differently than most sites do, in that it doesn't actually combine results from different engines. Instead, it just makes it easy to get results from a lot of different search engines.
Plus, Zuula supports a variety of different search types, and it clearly formats sponsored results (advertisements) and true search results differently.
At AltSearchEngines.com, we feature Zuula plus 99 others in our monthly Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list.
In all we cover well over 1,000 search engines on a daily basis.
I invite all PCW readers to stop by and take a scroll through ASE!
Charles Knight, editor
AltSearchEngines.com
Read/WriteWeb network
Thanks very much for pointing Zuula out to me, Simkovich. It has an unusual approach to metasearch, which I think misses the main point. Zuula still requires you to flip among pages (tabs) to find results, and hits can be duplicated on different tabs. I find it more useful to get all my results in one list, with duplicates merged. And Zuula doesn't suggest alternative search terms. So I'll stick with Dogpile for now. But perhaps other readers will like Zuula, and I really appreciate your taking the trouble to comment.
Thanks for your reply to my comment, Jonathan ... and my apologies for not writing back sooner myself. I missed your reply.
It's definitely true that some people want a metasearch tool that combines sources from a variety of different search engines. And, if that what you want, Zuula won't fit the bill.
However, almost all the popular metasearch tools that combine results also inject advertising into the results in ways that make it not-so-easy to distinguish between paid and "organic" results. In addition, some people feel comfortable with the results from one particular engine, but like to have quick access to other engine results "when the searching gets tough". That's why I think there's still a place for Zuula.
Plus, if you haven't checked Zuula out recently, you should see how it's expanded its image search section. And, frankly, image search is an area where different engines really do return very different results.
Good luck, Jonathan!