9 Feb 2008

Beyond Google

Most of the time whenever I want to find something on the web, I use my favourite search engine - Google. I am not unique as an informal survey of friends' preferred search engine reveal that most of them use Google as well. A handful use Yahoo! but none of them use MSN Live search, Altavista or Ask.

No one will disagree when I say that Google is now synonymous with searching on the net. The word "Google" has in fact become a verb and it's not uncommon to hear people use the terms "Googled" or "Googling".

Anyway, according to a trainer at a course I recently attended, only about half of web pages in any search engine's database exist only in that database, meaning that the other half will never come out in your search results.

You can see that this is true when you use different search engines to search for a particular term.

In the end, it might be a better idea to use Metasearch engines. They collate search results from several different search engines. One good example is Dogpile. Others include Clusty, Copernic, Mamma and Surfwax.

I have started using Dogpile and Copernic a lot and they do give better results than either Google or Yahoo used separately. Do try them out and tell me whether you agree.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The results of the searches that you will find on Google are much different on ask and msn search engines. The results are much better on Google as it is used by everyone so most of the people advertise on this engine.

Anonymous said...

I use Google as well.

But I like using Yahoo better. Google results are more commercialized IMO.

Anonymous said...

Usually as an seo-marketeer i want to stay out of the uncharted part of the web with my pages..but never the less is it a usefull tip.