h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I mostly search from google advanced search. I've been noticing for awhile now that when I put words in the "with all of the words" box I get results that don't have all the words. Really annoying What is the point of that?

I don't like google that much, I only use it because there doesn't appear to be anything better. Often I find that I have to wade through alot of sh*te to find what I am after. Particularly, I often find a huge amount of commercial sites especially ones that sell books on the topic I am interested in. There doesn't seem to be any way to avoid that - it even returns .com sites when I exclude .com from the domain search.

I know that google has this revolutionary way of assigning preference to hits based on the number of links from other sites to a particular page. However I am not necessarily interested in popularity and wonder if I would be better off with a different search engine (or another way of searching altogether).

Any ideas?

kea.

I use Lycos, and Yahoo too.

I found http://www.factbites.com/ last week but haven't used it much yet

It uses an altogether different approach and says so

<< Most searchers go straight to Google. But is it always the best choice?

We think Factbites is better than other search engines when it comes to presenting you with clearly summarised factual information.

We're never going to replace Google when you want to buy something over the net, or find your best friend's homepage - and we're not trying to. But for quick "Tell me about..." questions - the sort you'd normally go to an encyclopedia for - we think we're the best there is.

Factbites.com - better than Google for encyclopedia-style content.

Of course, you don't have to take our word for it. Compare the results for yourself!
>>

I believe you really need to know how to use Google to get results. The top ranking ones are usually commercial websites that have paid or popularised their way up, and it's better to start at page 3 or 4, although you may miss some gems. It really depends what you are looking for. I often wonder why a site doesn't invent a completely new searcg method, instead of using what is already there.

Yahoo is good, as is altavista, and Ask Jeeves too.

steer well clear of any new search engines which take results from other engines as they are likely to be confusing and useless.

i use altavista mostly, or ask jeeves when i want the popup bar thing it leaves!

Yeah I often wonder why someone doesn't come up with a new way to search.

I think part of the problem is that google has changed. I thought I did have a good enough grasp of how it worked. I have my preferences set to 100 hits per page, and it's rare for me to look beyond the first one or two pages. In the past, with careful choice of keywords, I would have had far less commercial and other rubbish.

The thing about not returning only hits with all the words I choose is just stupid though.


yahoo, lycos, altavista...are they all much of a muchness or do they vary? And do they work differenlty to google?


six7s, Factbites looks interesting. I've had a bit of a play. Will have a better look this week. I'd like to know how they are prioritising/choosing hits - I got some quite weird results. Weird can be good though

Thanks EvilAl.

Why do you use altavista?

Well i often use it for searching for video and sound, because you can directly search these. It's smaller also, so you don't have to sift through so much rubbish. But I guess you also miss out some of the good ones too.

Who knows?

I find Google is by far the best search engine around. The reason it is so popular is because it is so good. It is best for searching for obscure topics where there is not much information available on the web. It's not so good for searching for something that there are millions of pages about on the web, because you don't want a site that tries to sell you a book with the information you were looking for, you just want the information.

In general, Google only returns pages which have the words you asked for on them. You don't have to click any special box to get this. But the word may hidden in a metatag on the page. In other words, the writers of the page are allowed to include loads of extra words which aren't displayed but are used by search engines to find the page.

>>In general, Google only returns pages which have the words you asked for on them. You don't have to click any special box to get this. But the word may hidden in a metatag on the page. In other words, the writers of the page are allowed to include loads of extra words which aren't displayed but are used by search engines to find the page.<<

When I use Advanced Search I have the option of the following searches:

Find results:

with all of the words

with the exact phrase

with at least one of the words

without the words


If I choose "with all of the words" I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that the returns all have all of the words in them. This used to be true, but more and more lately I am getting hits that don't contain all of the words, in which case google should remove the "with all of the words" option and replace it with "some of the words"


As for the earlier comment about the top hits being paid to be prioritised, I think this was true for awhile, but that google no longer does this. That's why they have the commercial links separated off. I saw a news item recently where a google spokesperson stated categorically that they don't prioritise in the main list sites that have paid them.

http://www.mooter.com/moot

Not sure it's any better, but at least it's different

Actually that looked quite interesting. Except I couldn't get back to the original cluster, and the cluster I ended up on didn't seem that different from the others (potentially). Good on them for trying to categorise results.

Northern Light is assembled by humans instead of bots. I know it used to claim it was only librarians, but I think they have extended it.

You can enter 'search engine' into Google, and get a number of search engines (including Google). You could probably iterate this to find some interesting ones.