Pointless Rants

In Part I of this post, I gave my reasons for abandoning Google Search (as a step to abandoning Google as a whole). In reality, those reasons were only the spark that got me looking at alternatives, and if the alternatives hadn’t been so good, I would have probably returned, but the fact is, there are some other good search engines out there.

One of my interests in an alternative search engine is getting answers instead of links to answers. Here are a number of search engines and how they respond to the same simple search of “senate pro tem”. Specifically, I want to know who currently holds the position, which state he’s from, and his party.

• Google: first two links are to Wikipedia articles; third link gives the right name, but only in the excerpt; the first name in big letters is Senator Darrell Steinberg in the fifth link.
• Bing: the first link is to the Wikipedia article; the first name in big letters is Senator Loni Hancock; Byrd’s name does not appear on the first page of results, but if “Senate Pro Temp” is clicked under “Related Searches” on the left side, Byrd’s name and state appear in the excerpt of the fourth link.
• Cuil: the second link is to the Wikipedia article; I gave up trying to find Byrd’s name by the fifth page; almost all of the results were about California politicians.
• Duck Duck Go: an excerpt from the Wikipedia article is presented first in foremost, with Byrd’s picture right in it; the first link is to byrd.senate.gov, but other than that the name is not given.
• ChaCha: the first two links both give both Byrd’s name and state, and the fourth link gives his party, all in the excerpts; there are a lot of redundant results.
• Sproose: the first link gives Byrd’s name, state, and party in the excerpt from Wikipedia. While it seems to be a home run, the results are in small text and the page is somewhat busy.
• LeapFish: like Duck Duck Go, the Wikipedia article is quoted first and foremost with a picture but no name; the name is given in the third link.
• Mugurdy: the first two links are to Wikipedia. Byrd’s picture appears twice in the screenshots of the first page results, but the name, state, and party are not listed until the second page. (Points for loading excerpts and links before waiting for the screenshots to load.)

A lot of the results are fairly standard, mostly just skinned versions of what you’re probably already used to (that is, Google). The largest difference I’ve noticed in using something other than Google is that the results don’t load as quickly.

In order to see if I missed Google, I removed it from my list of search engines in Firefox, replacing it with Bing, Cuil, and Duck Duck Go. Right now I’m defaulting to Duck Duck Go, which I’ve found will sometimes give results sorted categorically. Also going for it:

• Hitting the forward slash will jump to the search box.
• The bottom of a list of results has a “More Links” link which uses AJAX to load more links (like Twitter does with tweets).
• Hovering over a result and its excerpt will highlight the whole thing because the whole thing is a link.

Cuil brags that it has more sites indexed than Google, and I’ve got it on my list in case I have a hard time finding what I’m looking for. Bing made the list for some of its user-friendly features like Related Searches and the unobtrusive site previews that fly out on the right. Mostly, though, I haven’t found much need for anything other than Duck Duck Go. (Honorable mention goes to Goby which, though it didn’t like my search for “senate pro tem”, does look like a good place to search for local interests.)

If you’re interested in alternative search engines, check out AltSearchEngines. I encountered it while working on this post, and it looks like it has some interesting coverage of non-traditional search engines. If you find something there you like, or if you use a search that hasn’t been listed here, let me know in the comments.