Friday, February 14, 2014

Bye-Bye Metacrawler

Research is one of the most important things an author can do. I hate reading books that have inaccuracies. Although authors have to bend the truth for the sake of the story, and author should have a reason for doing it that is something other than ignorance.

I have used Metacrawler as my favorite search engine for more than 15 years. It searched all the search engines and usually had great results. I always scorned other search engines because they never turned out the results accurately.

Then at the end of last year, Metacrawler began searching Blekko in addition to the standards: Google, Yahoo, etc. Whenever my results appeared, frequently the exact phrase would appear in results found on Blekko. If I typed in 19th century table manners, I would find that Blekko had 19th century table manners available for sale on e-bay. Yeah, thanks. Occasionally, I would click a link that I thought was taking me to a Wikipedia page only to find it was actually a link to a Blekko page with a bunch of advertising and the Wikipedia page displayed in the center.

I tried to notify Metacrawler of Blekko's uselessness as a search engine to no avail. Then in December the Metacrawler website announced it was turning into Zoo. I was not impressed with the new name, so I continued using the old website. However, sadly, at the end of January Metacrawler was permanently retired.

At first, I switched to Zoo - my favorites bar link to Metacrawler automatically redirected me there. Unfortunately, Zoo displayed very useless results. So, I erased my links and now I am using Google. Yuck. I do not feel Google is the best search engine, but until I find another mega search engine, I am stuck. At least it is better than Zoo... or Blekko.

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