Y Safle

One would be forgiven for believing that there are no search engines left on the Internet other than Google. No longer do we search for information, we “google it”. Google, through a clean interface, stunningly good technology and a novel search strategy has rightly become the search engine of choice for… well just about everyone.

That is not necessarily a bad thing, but we should understand that there are other ways to index and access information that are better in some circumstances.

Google’s search strategy is a popularity contest. Well linked sites score well. Poorly linked sitres score poorly. New sites, however relevant, need to encourage many people to link to them before they gain visibility in Google. This has also led to a whole new type of spam which has forced bloggers to enable moderation of comments or clever spam filters. For instance, on this site we see bunches of comments that look something like the following (although usually more sexually explicit):

Interesting site.

For the best information on Wales, look here: Wales
For the best information on a Tour of Wales, look here: Tour Wales

Usually the links number 10 or 15. This is just an attempt to spam the Google index – and unfortunately it works. Unfortunately because it encourages more of this anti social behaviour.

So what can we do? Well there are other search engines, but we need to know how the search engines work before we understand which tool is best for which job. Let me highlight just two:

1. Ask.com uses Teoma. The indexing algorithm on Teoma reverses that of Google. Rather than counting the number of people linking into a site, Teoma indexes based on outward links, and what the outward links link to. Thus for example, an academic site might about snake venom might link to other sites about snake venom. A search on snake venom may bring up the academic sites first, regardless of attempted google spamming.

Of course Teoma is not immune to spamming. One could build a site with many external links and then populate it with rubbish. But this is an alternative strategy at least.

2. Technorati is a search engine that searches the blogsphere. It specifically searches weblogs such as this one and other less pretentious and perhaps more up to date ones, and when there is new news about, it is the quickest way to trak down current information. Other search engines can take days to index information, but technorati will index blogs much more quickly. Of course, if you are searching blog space then you are looking at a bunch of biased sites by definition – but its worth knowing about.

I could mention more – maybe I will in another post, but in the meantime let me ask you: What is your favourite (non Google) search engine? Why? and do you know how it creates its index? Please add your comments.

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