Anti-Googling: does anyone use other search engines?

Back when the internet was young, there were lots of search engines out there. And everybody had their favorite: Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite, Hotbot, etc…
And there were lots of “meta-search” sites that offered lots of options and data bases.
Does anybody still use these?
I know they still exist, and I’m sure that many professions use specific search engines for legal or medical or technical info in certain field. But I’m asking about the general public, such as us Dopers.
We all talk about googling for our info–and I assume that most people are using Google exclusively.
I know MSN sets itself as a default and lots of people use it because it’s there.
And Yahoo is still popular, I suppose because lots of people use it as their home page. But I never hear anyone saying “I searched” the web–it’s always “I googled”.

GQ questions: are the other sites losing business, and at what rate? Which sites do most teenagers/young people use to search, and what trends are there? Are the other search sites likely to go the way of the print newspapers–surviving mostly on habits retained by older people , but facing a bleak future.?

And a GD question: what will happen if in the future there is only one commercial company whose secret search algorithms control how we get our information?

I use Dogpile though I find that most of its useful results do come from Google.

I was just thinking about this topic this morning. According to an html page I put together 8 or so years ago, Altavista was at one time my favourite search engine of them all (though at that time you sometimes had to use a few to find the site you needed).

Shortly after then Google took over; at first because it had the most flexible search interface, then because it was clear they had a more comprehensive index and because it wouldn’t stick paid links all over your search results, and lastly (and most vitally) Google filtered out all the lame banner-ad filled sites covered with keywords so you could find the kinky porn you really wanted.

I don’t know how the other sites are doing, but a monoculture isn’t good, either in technology or biology. One of the effects of this is in lawsuits against Google for dropping (usually scummy) sites pagerank. If Google decides your site is trying to game their stats, your rank will go way down. With things they are today, that means your site just fell off the internet.

Personally I use yahoo, but the reason for that is because those news headlines are about the only find out what’s going on in the world from my desk at work. Since I don’t actively read the news paper (or ANY news type websites), having them crammed in my face is my only way.

BTW a few months ago yahoo.com had some gawd awful ad on their page. The kind that floats around on the screen and makes it hard to click on the seach bar, so I stopped, using it but I find that search.yahoo.com is pretty unobtrusive.

Perhaps part of Google’s success is their small name and the ease with which it can be used as a verb.

I still use Alta Vista because of its greater flexibility in Boolean constructions (although they partly gutted this a couple years ago), and AllTheWeb because it often returns different and useful results.

In fact I’d like to know more about engines that let you construct complex Booleans. I only like automatic things when what they automatically do is what I wanted, which doesn’t seem to be often enough.

According to SearchEngineWatch, about 44% of searches are through Google, 29% through Yahoo and affiliates (including AltaVista), 13% through MSN, 6% through AOL, and 5% through Ask.

I have heard (but no cite to back it up) that in blind tests, Yahoo and Google are indistinguishable.

I also use Alta Vista because it searches .pdf files and does not rank like Google which can hinder looking for that obscure document.

I use jux2, dogpile, and vivisimo/clusty for metasearches, but I still rely heavily on Google.

I use Yahoo. Always have. I rarely use Google. I use Dogpile more than I use Google.

Usually I’ll narrow my search down with +/- and “” operators.

For the record, I’ve had jobs that consisted primarily of internet research, so I’m more than just a casual user.

Another vote for Yahoo

I remember using Webcrawler, then I turned to altavista, but google has been my friend since it started. My main reason is that their default page is not cluttered with junk and I can pick and choose what features to add.
I honestly think they’re winning because they are that good and they keep adding new stuff and pushing it’s competitors. I remember when hotmail had a limit of 20 MB for the account. Gmail came along and I guess all the free mail services now have to follow suit and add a lot of storage.

However, I predict that the succes will backfire and they will get a rep not unlike Microsoft, especially among computer geeks.

I almost always use Yahoo. It’s my home page since I also use some of their other services. Before they started using Altavista as a backend (way back in the day), I sometimes used Altavista too.

Altavista uses Yahoo to power it’s results. So if you use Altavista you’re using Yahoo. AOL uses Google to power its search results.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and Gigablast use their own spiders to crawl the web. Virtually every other search engine uses one of the first four to get their results.

MSN does the fastest in terms of getting new sites on its searches. I can submit a site and within two days it’s on MSN. Google takes about a month, and Yahoo will find you eventualy, within a month.

Google also has data centers so you and I could both go to www.google.com and get two different results for the same search engines because because Google uses different centers.

I like Gigablast because I find sites listed on it that are either not on the other four major search engines or are so far down on Yahoo and Google they are almost impossible to find. But Gigablast has so little of the web crawled yet that you have to use it IN ADDITION TO one of the other major search engines.

Moved to IMHO.

-xash
General Questions Moderator

Infoseek was the finest and best search engine. Where Yahoo and Alta Vista produced numerous instances of many of the results, Infoseek refined out the chaff and did a much better job of ranking. Disney, in its great wisdom, bought Infoseek and ended up gutting it, trying to turn it into a cash cow, and killing it off. Vestiges remain as go.com which is hooked to Yahoo, which apparently bought some elements of Infoseek’s engine a few years ago.

Now I’ll sometimes go to mamma.com to get more precise results and Ask.com for completely different results. I wish to goodness it were possible to resurrect the best of Infoseek because I think it would blow the doors off even Google. Google’s results are messy and imprecise.

When I’m searching for articles or sources relevant to my thesis (which I do a lot), I rely on Thompson’s ISI Database (which has a GREAT Boolean search) or the WorldCat (and check out the summaries on Amazon) a lot more than I do on Google Scholar. Google Scholar shows you the gray literature, which is nice, but the results aren’t ordered by date of publication. Nor, as far as I can tell, are they really ordered by relevance, which is pretty frustrating.

For other, non-academic, parts of my life, I pretty much go to Google first.

I think the first search engine I used with any regularity was one of the ancient spiders in the mid-1990s. Hotbot then became my favorite, followed by Altavista, and then Google around … oh, 1998 I think.

I used to use Hotbot, the Wired search engine, Yahoo and AltaVista lot. Now I mostly use Google. However, lately, I’ve been finding Google’s results to be imprecise and subject to a lot of spamming, not from porn sites generally but from mainstream businesses. Just try to find a good free site for property listings in a given area … you’re going to have to wade thorugh a gazillion real estate sites to find the good ones.

I’m ready for a new search engine if Google keeps this up. Google did a great job of dumping the unrelated porn spam, but commercial spamming is getting worse and worse each week on Google. I may have to start using Yahoo a lot more.

I use Yahoo Yellow Pages for finding stores and services http://yp.yahoo.com/
I use Yahoo Shopping to find online stores and services http://shopping.yahoo.com/