Meta.
And Bing has used Google results — through spying on users’ searches — to improve Bing searches…
Poor old Microsoft.
I used to use Alltheweb, but now it’s just Yahoo search, which I never thought was a particularly useful search engine.
So.
How many distinct search engines are still in common use? Are we down to two?
(For the sake of argument let’s leave aside specialist searchers such as those used for academic papers in geology for example.)
Apparently Yahoo gets results from Bing now.
I use Duckduckgo, which has various extra functionality. Some like ixquick/startpage because of the Privacy.
I remember when she used to post Google searches every other post
::Golfclap::
That’s not quite true. I feel compelled to defend Bing here, because I think they got a bad rap. This is off-topic, sorry.
What Bing did was create a toolbar to help them index site-specific search engines, the toolbar observed when you typed a string into something that looked like a search engine, and then added the links in the resulting page to their own index. There’s nothing wrong with this; Google used to do the exact same thing with their own toolbar. (I’m not sure if they still have this, but they did at one time.)
The only problem was that Bing’s toolbar didn’t blacklist Google itself. By searching for those misspellings using the Bing toolbar, the Google engineers doing the test were, themselves, inserting the data into Bing’s search database.
This is arguably “copying” Google’s search results, but it’s hardly the huge conspiracy people made of it. Unfortunately, “Bing toolbar intended to index site-side search results does exactly what it’s supposed to do even when the site is Google.com” doesn’t make as good a newspaper headline as, “Bing steals Google’s results!!!”
And considering Google has spent the last few years doing nothing but copying Bing (redesigning their image search to work identically to Bing’s, updating their homepage with a cute interactive feature every day, etc.) I hardly think they’re in a position to complain.
Of those, Yahoo=Bing and Excite=Bing+Google+A Russian search.
But Blekko, Ask, and Lycos seem to use their own crawlers, as far as I can tell…
I am pretty sure that most of those are not distinct search engines any more. Yahoo, as has been mentioned several times in this thread, gets its results from Bing. I am pretty sure Ask.com, Lycos and Excite also now get their results from some other search engines, although I am not sure which. (Possibly, like Dogpile, they combine Bing and Google results). Maybe Blekko is a true stand alone search engine, but I am not confident of that.
So basically, it is now Google and Bing, and Bing only survives because Microsoft subsidizes it.
I used to use dogpile back in the stone age. I went there and searched “wombat,” because that’s what I always use for “is this thing working” kind of searches. I got good results, but on the side, there was a list called “Are you looking for?” with the following links:
Wombat
Acrobat
Women Faith
Bath Body Works
Bat
Woman Within
Hodaka Wombat
Shipping
Tha hell?
I’m waxing nostalgic here. There’s a neat chronological chart of web search engines here which brings back memories. Archie was just a little before I started using the net, although it was still around in 92/93 when I finally got online. Excite was the big new thing at the time It was all about portals before Google came along, search engine pages like Excite, Yahoo, Lycos were crammed full of extraneous stuff. That’s why when I first saw Google I was instantly attracted to it, just a simple uncluttered page with the name Google and a search box and a small line of text underneath which told you how many pages Google searched, a number which went steeply up almost day by day. I’ve used Google ever since.