Search engines that don't suck

So since Google has gone to the Dark Side, I have been experimenting the last few days with different search engines. (Thanks, incidentally, to Mentor, Gnome, Geeka, and Rebecca, who all left comments with suggestions of search engines to try out.) I am sure you will be deeply excited to know that I am now ready to share my hard-won wisdom with teh internets.

For the benefit of those of you with reading comprehension difficulties, I have helpfully divided the list below into three sections: Search engines that suck, search engines that don't suck, and search engines with extra awesomeness. I am not going to review any of them in depth, but will annotate each with a brief, yet somehow still incredibly helpful and witty comment. I won't pretend this list is at all objective,* but maybe it will give you some ideas if you too are planning to abandon the Evil One.


Search engines that suck

Ms Dewey has possibly the most irritating interface I have ever come across. Make sure you have your speakers set to low or turned off if you try out this page at work.

Metacrawler sprinkles ads surreptitiously throughout the search results.

Grokker broke my browser. Ten seconds to load, my arse. Maybe for those of you in the lands of infinite bandwidth.


Search engines that don't suck

Alltheweb is like an ugly version of Google. Yes, I know I can skin it. But I can't be bothered. And the fact that it too automatically detects the Danish setting of my browser makes me fear for the future.

Ask.com reminds me of a butler. Reviews suggest it works pretty well, though.

Accoona seems pretty average. Cluttered. Gets averagely relevant results. A bit like Google but not as good. (Although the "target your search" dropdown boxes are kind of cool.)

Yahoo! is okay, but kind of ordinary. And looks a bit unprofessional up on your screen. Google displaying on screen is something you can get away with when your boss walks into the office unexpectedly. Yahoo! not so much.

Exalead has a nice "narrow your search" bar on the right-hand side. The results don't seem very relevant, though, and apparently it's nowhere near the size of Google, nor has it updated its index in the past two years.

Aftervote is fun. And you can pretend you are part of the elite by cluttering your screen with all sorts of "advanced settings" that the plebs don't know about. It seemed to return relevant results, too.


Search engines with extra awesomeness

Zuula searches across Google, Yahoo, MSN, Gigablast and Exalead and returns the results in tabbed form. Even though Google has cruelly betrayed me, I would be prepared to keep using it via Zuula, since that way I get the Google goodness without the personalised experience.

Dogpile, irritatingly, includes hits from ads among its results, but it seems to return a much lower ratio of ads to real sites compared to Metacrawler. (Did it just wag its tail at me?) Like Zuula, it uses the major search engines, including Google (and thankfully NOT the personalised version, even when I am logged into my gmail account). (And it did just wag its tail at me.)

Goodsearch gives a penny per search to a charity of your choice. It's powered by Yahoo!, so the search results are good, too.

Vivissimo is Clusty with a different interface. But I saw Clusty first.

Clusty is my new boyfriend. Oh. my. god. I honest-to-goodness(ly) felt shivers down my spine when I saw my first search results all grouped so nicely into clusters. I felt only a small twinge of regret as I deleted Google from my bookmarks toolbar, and it was more than balanced out by anticipation and intellectual superiority I felt when adding Clusty in its place. The only downside is that it doesn't search the major engines like Google and Yahoo! but only smaller, free ones. Even so, the quality of the results it is returning is astoundingly good.


In Summary

I think I will be relying on Clusty and Zuula from now on. Maybe with some Goodsearch thrown in. Take that, Evil Empire!

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* I did perform the same three tests on all of them initially, though. First I did two searches related to my dissertation, each of which on Google turns up a few thousand results with some extremely useful stuff in the first few pages. Then (completely arbitrarily and unfairly), I searched for the acronym for an upcoming conference, for which Google USED TO return the conference website as the top hit. I then bookmarked the search engines that turned up useful results on all three of those searches, and continued to play with them for a couple of days to decide which would be The One.