To my dismay I have discovered that I have been using a steaming pile of toss of a search-engine for many years, thinking it was the best one. It was Alta Vista. I now use Google and almost believe google knows what I want even if I don’t type anything. Story…
I was idly browsing through the daytime TV on SKY (UK) when I caught the film about Rocky and Bullwinkle. (Not sure of the name, it was probably “Rocky and Bullwinkle”) More importantly than that (and the reason I did something I haven’t done for years, i.e. move quickly to the edge of my seat and say “fucking hell she’s gorgeous!”) I caught Piper Perabo!.
Somehow - the way she had slightly over-applied her lipstick (beyond the edges of her lips by half a millimetre) had me mesmerized. (among other things)
The first thing I do when I see someone I like on TV is make a mental note to search for websites/pictures of them next time I am on my computer. Well I was on my computer. I did the search using ‘trusty’ Alta Vista. I found a few broken links pages (and the inevitable porn site claiming to have nude pictures of the star in question) and a couple, (exactly a couple - 2) of pages with small and grainy pictures.
Eventually I thought to myself - This woman is stunning. There must be more/better websites than these!
One of the websites I found using Alta Vista was one of those pointless ones which claim to search a set of links to stars for your star (but which actually just puts your string into a chosen search engine and runs the search) On the list was Google. I knew the name ‘google’ well. I have heard it countless times on the SDMB (and I knew of it anyway)
So I thought - what harm can using another search engine do (I was under the impression that most top-notch search engines were equally good at finding websites - so was not optimistic about the results) I used google, and was amazed at the sheer number of websites it found which were exactly what I wanted.
(I thought Alta Vista was the best one because I had read an article many years ago that said it was at the top of the list of ‘best search engines’. Turns out things have changed since then!)