Weapons of Mass Instruction

Search Engines (or how I learned that there was more to life than Google). Apparently people still make these things. I remember the early days of the internet (Webcrawler) and some of the search engines that you'd find. They were somewhat helpful. Today they're a little more helpful, partially due to the amount of information out there - it's easier to find somethings when there's a lot of it. The problem stems from the fact that you find a lot of it. Search engines are one of those things that people probably thought would doom libraries. And while I suspect we don't get a lot of phone calls or people coming in asking for random facts any more, oddly enough, libraries still around. Go figure.

So, yes, sorry for the distraction. Search Engines. I played around with the following:
Exalead
Clusty
KartOO
and Yahoo (you know, as a control, it's been around a while)

I will state at the beginning, if you want to see a pretty search engine, go play with KartOO. That's one nifty graphical interface. It would have killed my poor old 14.4 modem back in the day.

So I searched on Empire State Building. And oddly enough surprising no one, the results were pretty similar. See, if they don't take you to pretty similar, important places first, they won't really be considered a very effective search engine. The differences really come in how they present the info and the ways they offer to help your search. Exalead gives you the sponsored sites first, followed by the official site, but does offer pretty little thumbnails. They also offer some nice ways to narrow your search in the sidebar. Clusty led off with the official site and then offered cluster results on the sidebar. Somewhat interesting to click around on.

KartOO, as mentioned, has an eye-catching graphical representation of the results. Strangely the official site is off on it's lonesome, but it does have a larger graphic. It looks like they roughly map out how some of the sites interact with each other as well and that drives some of the site placement. Nifty. And our control - Yahoo - has your sponsored sites, some image results and then oh yeah, the official site.

See, there's one of the problems with search engines right there. You can now pay to get your site ranked higher. Sneaky. Not necessarily helpful either. It was actually pretty interesting to see what people are doing in the realm of search engines. Google (and Yahoo) is so ubiquitous that it can seem like there aren't other options. The new ones try to sneak in with the bells and whistles, the little touches they offer (thumbnails, sidebars that help you narrow results and so on) to help you in your searching. Searching for a song? Here, let's give you an embedded player that contains a snippet of the song in question. Shiny paint. Again, while they may try to set themselves apart on the outside, if they don't have a decent engine (heh) under the hood the results they offer won't be as useful as the big guys. And they will die a Darwinian internet death. Which means they'll show up in Google cache. Poor souls. Nothing really dies on the internet...