Google? What's so good about it?

[Ablett]

I have heard 3 good wraps for it in the past week alone. What's so good about it? Is it better then AltaVista? Yahoo? Infoseek? Why do so many regard it as the best search engine? How old is it?

http://www.google.com

[ticker]

It's fast, is not covered in advertisements and has an uncanny ability to find just what you are looking for.

[TheNerd]

It's better because it's very fast, and it returns relevant results.

Most search engines rank results according to the number of keywords matched on a page. That's why every other page that comes up sends you to a porn site; they stuff the meta tags with everything they can think of.
Google, on the other hand, ranks pages based on what other pages link to them. This has the consequence that sites that are actually about what you're looking for come up.

Google also has the nifty caching feature, where if a result comes up, there is a cached version on Google that you can access if the original page has since been taken down. Google even highlights your search terms on the cached version.

[Diver]

PC Mag just did an article on search engines and rated Google pretty high. Northern Light was You should be able to read the article at http://www.pcmag.com.
I have used it for a couple of years because it consistently gives me better results than the others I have tried.

[Diver]

Somehow the last part of the Northern Light sentence didn't make it. Should have read. Northern Light was also rated high.

[Philster]

It's fast, and good to boot. But check out Profusion.com, as it combines many engines and options, and does it with simplicity.

[Celyn]

Yes, what everyone else said.:) Although I'm not at all knowledgable about the internet, I certainly prefer Google, or possibly AlltheWeb. I think I used to used Copernic a little, then it began to look as though some things were usually the most sufficient on it, so ended up using Google out of habit.

Lately I tried again with AltaVista, as it seems highly thought of, but I got so exasperated by advertisement links and pointless suggestions. Tried Yahoo, and ditto.

And a low-grade lazy answer - Google also makes it easy to put a Google search button on the toolbar, which might be no big deal, but it tends to make it my default choice.

Now, of course, I'm going to investigate Northern Light.

[lno]

Plus, Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" link is good for occasional laughs. I wonder what will happen if I select 'robotic monkey butler' and see if I feel lucky ..

In fact, I'll go try that now.

[Scarlett67]

I set Google as my home page. I do a lot of fact-checking in my daily work, and Google is the best search engine I've found.

Another note: On holidays, Google decorates its logo with the appropriate theme. A lot of times, I don't remember it's a holiday until the Google logo pops up. It's pretty cute. I sent them an e-mail one time commenting on how much I liked the holiday decorations, and they sent me a free T-shirt in response! How's that for PR?

[Celyn]

Just thought - maybe we should get Google to pay to be advertised on SDMB?

And re. OP,

it has pretty colours, and you can quickly get rid of the "web directory" bit and have a really good clear screen.

[Fredge]

Originally posted by Celyn
Lately I tried again with AltaVista, as it seems highly thought of, but I got so exasperated by advertisement links and pointless suggestions.

If you like AltaVista's results but don't like all the portal junk they throw in you can try http://www.ragingsearch.com. It's the AltaVista engine minus the portal stuff.

[MovieMogul]

In addition to separating the wheat from the chaff in any given specific search, I also like the "Search within results" which allows you to go deeper and deeper into a search result to narrow down your search even farther (most other engines I've seen either default after a certain number of terms, or actually broaden the search instead)

A Test: Search for my Real Name (which is rather unique)

Google: The first 3 results all are specific references to yours truly.

Yahoo: First 3 results match (although no "search within result" option)
Profusion, Northern Light: 2 of first 3 results match, but other reference not in next 22 results. (though Profusion also found an old broken link)
HotBot, Lycos: First result refers to me, but next 24 do not.
AltaVista, DirectHit, Excite: The first 25 results do not refer to me.
Deja, Go: No results found at all.

Totally unscientific, but typical of searches I might do...

[malaka]

Not a "me too" post, but...

...I've always used MetaCrawler.com. It "searches the search engines" including Lycos, Yahoo, Google, AltaVista...and many others. The results are ranked and usually pretty accurate.

[SmackFu]

Yahoo falls back to Google searches if it can't find any links in it's own directory. That explains your success ArchiveGuy. It all comes back to Google...

[Celyn]

Originally posted by Fredge
http://www.ragingsearch.com.[/url] It's the AltaVista engine minus the portal stuff.

Thanks, I should look at that. Nice name!

[omni-not]

Google is an excellent search engine for all the reasons mentioned above. I use it regularly. I believe it was listed in Forbes' edition 'The Best of the Web', several months back. It's very fast and efficient.

Re: Toolbar.

I just noticed this article in today's edition of C-Net. Worth a read.

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4101496.html

[Celyn]

I wonder whether the simple little button does that, or just the new "added toolbar" thing? I have to admit, they make it pretty clear that the toolbar may track information, but they don't say anything about the browser buttons. Hmm.

[omni-not]

If you mean the 'Google Search' and 'I feel lucky' buttons, I don't think you need be worried too much. I don't have any proof of this but I think the Google people are pretty straightforward about such matters (as 'warnings' on the toolbar installation page attest). But you never know...

[lissener]

Thanks all of you, especially Scarlett67 and Fredge.

I do a lot of freelance factchecking for an educational publisher, and I've always preferred Altavista: if you know exactly what criteria to give it (which takes a bit of practice) and you can ignore the ads, it almost always finds what I'm looking for. But I will test drive Google and see if it meets my needs.

And as far as putting the button on your toolbar, you can do that with any web page.

[DonJuanDeMarco3]

Octopus has a super search that is combination of all of these sites in one, and the format is even better than the original

http://www.octopus.com/home.htm

[cornflakes]

Originally posted by Scarlett67
Another note: On holidays, Google decorates its logo with the appropriate theme...

This touches on the reason I like Google: It has a graphic. If I want to do a search, I want to search, not wait while the graphics load (and yes, I could turn graphics off or use Opera, but...)

OTOH, I wished it defaulted to OR logic, and it seems to have trouble recognizing words inside quotes as being phrases.

[Derleth]

I use google.com out of habit: I've typed it so often into my address bar it's muscle memory now. I can rip it off in the time it takes for my nerves to fire without engaging the rest of my brain at all. I was a user of Yahoo, because they advertise and are the most frequently referenced. But, as has been said above, Google is the One True Search Engine. The ranking pages by links is genius. Caching is inspired. The speed is great. The fact that Yahoo uses its engine is proof: Google is the best. Go to it first and eliminate the middlemen who use its engine but not its simple and clean interface.

(I have also had good results with dogpile.com, a metasearch engine, but Google is always my first stop. It is frequently my last.)

[omni-not]

To use technical lingo: Google is google-icious! Google rules!!

Nuff said.

[OpalCat]

Google is my favorite. First off, the site isn't covered in crap. It isn't trying to be a news/entertainment/advertizing/portal/etc it's just trying to be a search engine. Second, it's FAST. Third, it gets more and better results.

A search for "opalcat" on these four engines:

Google: 2,870
Yahoo: 3 (within the index)
Excite: 590
AltaVista: 985 - (interestingly, the first match is http://www.straightdope.com/faq/index.html )

[Chronos]

Which search engine is best depends on what you're trying to do. Google gets high marks for relevance (thanks to that ranking-by-links), so it's a good choice if you're looking for something common, but only want the good info. Altavista, however, has a much larger database, so if you're looking for something obscure (as in, mentioned on a half-dozen pages on the entire Web), it's a better choice. Also, last I knew, Google was almost unique among major search engines in not supporting advanced searches: Phrase matching, required/omitted keywords, Boolean expressions, etc. Search within results might be nice, but if you know what you're doing, you can get the exact same effect with Altavista.

As to the ads on AltaVista, ironically, one time I couldn't find any listing for the web page I was looking for in the seach database, but it was the advertisement on the top of the page. Capitalism at work, no?

[Tengu]

Originally posted by Chronos
Also, last I knew, Google was almost unique among major search engines in not supporting advanced searches: Phrase matching, required/omitted keywords, Boolean expressions, etc.

It still doesn't do Boolean (far as I can tell) but you CAN require or exclude words, in their 'Advanced Search', now.

[Extant]

I can never get the answers I need from Google.

I usually start here http://www.thesurfer.com/

Sometimes this one works better http://www.directhit.com/

[DonJuanDeMarco3]

OK, no opinions just numbers.

this is when "opalcat" was searched

directhit=23
octopus=7,331
google=2,870
yahoo=3
metacrawler=30
Northernlight=1,629
ragingsearch=20


This is when "New York" was searched

directhit=210
octopus=39,470,073
google=2,260,000
yahoo=7,314
metacrawler=55
Northernlight=13,441,203
ragingsearch=23,750,262


It depends on what you search and what you want. Some of the links of search engines that got high figures had dead links and sites that had nothing to do with the searched words.

It all depends...

[handy]

Lots of times I input users questions from this board into that search engine & get the answer, then I post it here just for laughs.