Thanks Tomndebb - I’ll check out your recommendations.
As long as we’re discussing search engines in such a calm and rational way (!), does anybody have any input on whether WebFerret is any good? My brother swears by it, but I am leery of downloading and installing things that might upset the carefully calibrated balancing act I call a computer. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Google works fine for me 90% of the time, but I find myself wondering about the other 10%. Is there such a thing as a “perfect search engine”? One that will slice, dice, chop, shred, puree, and walk the dog, too?
As I’ve been pretty preoccupied with them for too long, I thought I’d just some views on the engines. As a general rule, I think it’s best to use different engines for different kinds of search
For a fast and accurate search Google (as mentioned above) is hard to beat. Very subject specific and not too plagued with spam (irrelevant pages).
Northern Light is a good academic/research engine but not updated that often so anything concerning recent events might not be there yet.
Of the Directory’s, Yahoo is good if you understand the category structure. Also, don’t forget the largest Directory: http://www.dmoz.org (The Open Directory Project). It has 23,000 volunteer editors indexing sites in a kind of for-the-good-of-humanity/’open source’ project. Its index is bigger than Yahoo’s, has a similar structure, also uses Inktomi as the backup (see below) but Yahoo may have the edge in quality (hence fewer sites).
For reading ‘around’ subjects rather than looking for a specific answer (but it does that well, also), the Inktomi engine is good but a little spammed. However, it will improve dramatically over the next two months as a new algorithm kick in. You can’t go to Inktomi directly, the best way to access it is to use Yahoo for the search and then, when the results come up, click on ‘web pages’. If ‘web pages’ isn’t on the screen it means Yahoo returned no results and you’re looking at Inktomi results. For straight to/pure Inktomi results use Hotbot.
Dogpile is a meta engine. For accuracy, that can be good but it might not be. Probably best to use Dogpile in non-commercial searches i.e. non competitive. And you can also use it’s cousin Ask Jeeves.
I love it …use it all the time. I have it on two NT4 SP6 computers and three Win98 SE computers.
For a while on one of the NT4 computers, it wasn’t shutting itself down properly, and when I tried to shut down the computer I wou;ld have to shut down one task per instance of Web Ferret since the last boot. Then it stopped. Go figure.
No problems otherwise.
And my computers tend to be on the brink of disaster at all times, too.
The free version of WebFerret is my searcher of first resort. See the FerretSoft site. I also use SavvySearch, especially for phrase searches. I rarely use any other searcher.
For too many people, their engine of first resort is the SDMB. Some of us, including me, are just smart enough to know the answer and just stupid enough to give it.