"the general user" will follow the trend - and if the trend is that another search engine has better results - just like earlier posts people will deviate from their current engine to a "better" one.
Yes but who is saying Yahoo has better results? or Altavista? MSN maybe... but even they aren't going to depose Google any time soon...
I am not here to say which engine is better - users will be the judge. But I can say that G has definitely taken a few steps backwards over the last few weeks. Have you compared some results lately.
the portal brings in community which brings in cash. maybe they should just seperate the entities a little better.
A few years back before I discovered Google, I had tried all sorts of search engines. Although I wasn't dedicated to any one search engine, I leaned towards AltaVista. Infoseek sometimes. Yahoo's search occasionally. Anybody remember Northern Light? But ask.com (or askjeeves) was just horrible. I don't think I ever found a single result that answered whatever question I was asking. Google came along and I stopped experimenting with a variety of search engines. I find that a base of Google as my search engine, and topic specific sites (such as imdb) does the trick. Also, I'm using wikipedia more and more for things that are topics, as opposed to problems that need solving.
What results do you prefer? http://www.altavista.com/image/results?q=toxic&mik=photo&mik=graphic&mip=all&mis=all&miwxh=all http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=sv&lr=&rls=CNDB,CNDB:2005-43,CNDB:en&q=toxic
I confess I don't do a lot of searches for images but if anyone seriously expects me to believe that Alta Vista is doing ANYTHING better than Google, all I can say is I probably still have an opening available for next week or the week after
I just searched for something extremely timely yesterday (you can see my blog for a mention of the context), and yahoo is the only one who had any listing. Both google and msn were empty. Yahoo had not only the listing, but the right listing at the top. In my normal search usage, Yahoo is normally third on my list. Perhaps I need to move it up a bit.
That is probably the reality of it. I can't even find my own pages in yahoo.. I keep getting hits from yahoo but then they hide the rankings from me. Yahoo is very tricky.
I got hooked on google a couple years ago, after constantly reading the term "do a google search" in several message boards I frequent. I was a yahoo guy up until then, and simply got curious as to what the hell this "google" was. That is how I was introduced to the evil empire.
While AltaVista is the oldest crawler-based search engine operating. The service began in December 1995 and was owned by Digital, then by Compaq, when that company purchased Digital in 1998, then later spun off into a private company, which is majority-owned by CMGI. For several years, AltaVista was the "Google" of its day, in terms of providing relevant results and having a loyal group of users that loved the service. However, the multitude of owners, a misstep to turn the service into a portal in 1998 and a drop in its relevancy caused the company to lose users. As the result most of us just love Google now.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/34711_2161901 It is customary to give credit to the source when quoting a written passage.