Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet - Shopping around
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This post is part of a series entitled "Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet", based on my presentation at the 2006 AUKML Conference in Edinburgh
Shopping around
My final piece of advice to you when searching the internet is to shop around. There is a real danger that putting some words into Google will become the be-all and end-all of information retrieval on the web - but there are loads of topic areas that it doesn't search particularly well. And although it may still have a clear market share lead over Yahoo!, to be honest, there is barely any difference in the quality of the results. Try your search on both.
Ask.com has really lost ground in the market place, but it is coming up with some surprisingly innovative services. Their blog search, for example, uses subscription data from the Bloglines RSS aggregator business they also own to determine relevancy and authority - and seems much better than the services in that area offered by their direct competitors. It is also simpler to use, though less feature rich, than Technorati, which has become the "industry standard" blog searching tool.
You might also want to try one of the meta search engines. Vivissimo are proud of their clustering search algorithm, which looks over several search engines at once, and aggregates results together by theme and topic. You can try out the technology over at their own site or on the Clusty search engine.
Finally, if you are interested in the way that search is developing, then keep an eye on the major search engine research playgrounds, Google Labs and Yahoo! Research.
If you are really interested in keeping up with the latest internet search developments, you might also consider subscribing to a site like Search Engine Watch or Pandia Search Central, which will keep you up-to-date with new features introduced by search engines across the internet.