[Lilug] who uses another seearch engine ?? Google alternatives ??? RE: The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

Tue Feb 10 09:23:30 PST 2009

anyone using another search engine than Google ??

results ??

i would like to find an alternative for serious research
( ie no Amazon links, etc ) -  i realize you can "not" these, but Google
tends toward "what do you want to by" and the adwords skew

anyone found another search engine they like ??
used to use Northern lights and altavista before they died ..

-----Original Message-----
From: lilug-bounces at lilug.org [mailto:lilug-bounces at lilug.org] On Behalf
Of Kenneth Downs
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 10:06 AM
To: LILUG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Lilug] The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

Flying way off on a tangent here, the Sci Fi writer Stephen Baxter
conjectures that if we are ever going to have artificial intelligences
like in the movies, they would evolve out of the search engines.

"Computer, please tell me about ancient Rome"

"I have thousands of documents available, would you like to begin with a
general summary?"

"Yes please"

"This history of ancient Rome is divided roughly into the periods of the
kingdom, the republic, and the empire - "

"Computer, stop, what sources do we have for the kingdom?"

"Our sources are limited to the Roman history Livius, who wrote about
the kingdom in the reign of Augustus.  He was writing of a period
between 500 and 750 years prior to his own birth..."

you get the idea.  The friendly useful computer is really just a talking
search engine.  It only becomes HAL when you give it control of life
support.

Robert Wilkens wrote: 

I personally wonder who will be the first to volunteer to stop using
Google.  In my experience, it's the only search engine that finds
exactly what I'm looking for almost every time.  I often wind up using
something like Live Search first because it's the default in my browser,
but too often I find the first page of results is either mostly spam, or
completely unrelated to what I'm looking for.  As long as Google is one
of the few engines that is as up-to-date with search results and
reliably finds what I'm looking for, I feel it will in my book always
remain my first choice.

I'm not saying a better search tool will never come along, but for today
there are few truly good generic alternatives.

Rob

From: lilug-bounces at lilug.org [mailto:lilug-bounces at lilug.org] On Behalf
Of Justin Dearing
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 5:21 PM
To: LILUG Mailing List
Subject: [Lilug] The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

Some interesting points. Although, I think eventually google will
collapse under its own weight like most monopolies do if left to their
own devices. Rome fell to the barbarians. Ironically, the barbarians
eventually called themselves the Holy Roman empire even though they were
neither very Roman nor very Holy. 

Eventually google will fat and lazy that we will all run a completely
decentralized search engine running through freenet on virtualbox
instances of the hurd or something else no one else could have
predicted.

Sent to you by Justin Dearing via Google Reader:

The Elephant in the Room: Google
<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001224.html> Monoculture

via Coding  <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/> Horror by Jeff Atwood on
2/9/09

I was browsing the sessions at an upcoming Search Conference
<http://en.oreilly.com/found> , which describes itself thusly: 

The way to online success is through being easily found in search
engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. While
developers have historically thought of search as a marketing activity,
technical architecture has now become critical for search success. 

Anyone else see the elephant in the room, there? No? 

Image removed by sender. Banksy: elephant in room

Just two weeks after we launched Stack Overflow, I mentioned that search
engines already made up 50% of our
<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001174.html> traffic. Well,
not so much search engines as search engine: 

I try to be politically correct in discussing web search, avoiding the
g-word whenever possible, desperately attempting to preserve the
illusion that web search is actually a competitive market. But it's
becoming a transparent and cruel joke at this point. When we say "web
search" we mean one thing, and one thing only: Google. Rich Skrenta
explains
<http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/googles_true_search_market_sha.html> : 

I'm not a professional analyst, and my approach here is pretty
back-of-the-napkin. Still, it confirms what those of us in the search
industry have known for a long time. 

The New York Times, for instance, gets nearly 6 times as much traffic
from Google as it does from Yahoo. Tripadvisor gets 8 times as much
traffic from Google vs. Yahoo. 

Even Yahoo's own sites are no different. While it receives a greater
fraction of Yahoo search traffic than average, Yahoo's own flickr
service gets 2.4 times as much traffic from Google as it does from
Yahoo. 

My favorite example: According to Hitwise, [ex] Yahoo blogger Jeremy
Zawodny gets 92% of his inbound search traffic from Google, and only
2.7% from Yahoo. 

That was written almost two years ago. Guess which way those numbers
have gone since then? 

Now that Stack Overflow <http://stackoverflow.com/>  has been chugging
right along for almost six months, allow me to share the last month of
our own data. Currently, 83% of our total traffic is from search
engines, or rather, one particular search engine: 

Search Engine

Visits

Google

3,417,919

Yahoo

9,779

Live

5,638

Search

2,961

AOL

1,274

Ask

1,186

MSN

1,177

Altavista

202

Yandex

191

Seznam

103

Those 6x and 8x numbers that Rich quoted two years ago seem awfully
quaint now. Google delivers 350x the traffic to Stack Overflow that the
next best so-called "search engine" does. Three hundred and fifty times!

Now, I don't claim that Stack Overflow is representative of every site
on the internet -- obviously it isn't. It's a site for programmers. And
let me be absolutely crystal clear that I have no problem at all with
Google. That said, I find it profoundly disturbing that if every other
search engine in the world shut down tomorrow, our website's traffic
would be effectively unchanged. That's downright scary. 

Yes, I like Google. Yes, Google works great and has been my homepage for
about eight years now. Google nailed search, and they deserve the
leadership position they've earned. But where's the healthy competition?
Where's the incentive for Google to improve? All I see is a large and
growing monoculture that acts as the start page for the internet
<http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_t.html> . 

I'm a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the
Microsoft "monopoly" ten years
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft> ago aren't out
in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to
go after Google. Does the fact that Google's products are mostly free
and ad-supported somehow exempt it from the same scrutiny? Isn't anyone
else concerned that Google, even with the best of "don't be evil"
intentions, has become more master than servant
<http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid.html> ? 

Calling the current state of search engine competition a horse race is
an insult to horse races. No, what we have here is a one horse race
where all the other horses were shipped off to glue factories years ago.
Forget "search conference", you should be throwing a "Google
conference", because there's no difference. 

I don't know. Maybe that's OK. But it does mean that if Google, for
whatever reason, decided to remove you from its search results, your
website no longer exists
<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000767.html> . At least not
as a viable business, anyway. 

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Kenneth Downs

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