Posted on 01/14/2012 3:09:53 PM PST by narses
The time was that yahoo answered most basic searches sort of well. And then along came google, and for a while they looked like the gold standard. But lately the SEO games and massive quantity of stuff online has made simple queries painful. Anyone have a better set of search engines for the DIY or how to crowd?
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‘Altavista’, now that brings back memories!
http://google.com automatically redirects to https://www.google.com. That way, you don't have to remember to type https. Gmail is also encrypted.
What you don't understand is that search is not Google's product. You are Google's product. Google doesn't get paid to index the internet. It gets paid to deliver your attention to advertisers. Being better than its competitors at indexing the internet and organizing the world's information is simply Google's way of inducing you and millions of others to serve as its product.
The same is true of Bing. If you are not seeing ads on Bing, it just means they're incompetent and being kept in business by their being part of the left-leaning Colossus of Redmond (if you use Bing or Windows or Office, you are helping to finance leftard causes — live with it).
If you don't want to be a search company's product, you can sign up for Lexis/Nexis (for big $$).
I have a suggestion for Google: Figure out a way for the few salient facts that fact checkers are looking for to come up on the first screen, without the fact checker having to hit any links.
E.g., when you put in a prominent person’s name: Correct spelling, birth and death dates, position, party affiliation if a politico, etc. This would save oodles of time.
Wkikpedia is pretty good, but you almost always have to go to the actual Wikipedia entry to check these things out.
Doesn’t Dogpile use Google? In effect a front end overlay for Google?
E.g., when you put in a prominent person’s name: Correct spelling, birth and death dates, position, party affiliation if a politico, etc. This would save oodles of time.
The new search engine DuckDuckGo has taken a stab at that. Compare Michele Bachmann at DDG vs Google vs Bing. For another example, try WFB on DDG vs Google vs Bing.
Thanks. I’ll try it.
Privacy is not a concern for me. I do fact checking on so many different subjects that my search record wouldn’t make sense to anyone.
bump
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