So, I lost my favorite mega search engine (Metacrawler) several weeks ago when it became Zoo. I was not impressed with the new layout, but I had been loosing my 16 year love of Metacrawler when they began including searches from Blekko. I hate blekko because it was always returning stupid results. I would type in "18th century social reform" and it would return "Find 18th century social reform on eBay." I really doubt it...
So, I switched to Google. This was a logical choice since I have two Google e-mail accounts, this blog which is written on a website owned by Google, and I have a Google+ account. But, I never switched to Google thinking I would stay there. It is still my home page, but it is only one search engine.
Authors and researchers need a mega search engine. I quickly became frustrated with Google and so I searched for something more powerful. Finally, I have added Dogpile to my favorites bar. Google is still my homepage because it makes getting to all my accounts easy, but Dogpile has been holding its own for a couple of weeks. It searches four other search engines, so it isn't as extensive as Metacrawler used to be, but it also doesn't search Blekko - which I feel is very appropriately named. After all, if I wanted to by social reform on eBay, wouldn't I at least want something from the 21st century?
Okay Jennifer, so I'm a cyberspace dinosaur. I thought google was the be-all and end-all, then I found Bing. Now you inform me of an even more comprehensive search engine. I'll give it a try and see if I can see what I hadn't seen. But I wonder if there's a direct relationship between the comprehensiveness of a search engine and its user data mining efficiency? The Internet is wondrous and scary!
ReplyDeleteGoogle gets in a little deeper than just your basic search engine - I think it wants to be Big Brother. :) Most search engines only collect data from users in a general - Dogpile's Privacy Policy is here: http://infospace.com/terms/privacy.html (Unless you sign up with an account they only track minimal information about you to improve your experience, i.e. your web browser, which pages you clicked, etc.)
ReplyDeleteMeta search engines mine other search engines. They send an instant request to several search engines at one and return all the results on one page.
My personal belief on tracking is: if you don't want others to know about it, don't put it on a computer hooked up to the internet and certainly don't post it on the Internet. :)
Thanks for stopping by!