The Stoa Consortium

Seen in Read/Write Web (by Charles S. Knight):

Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: “Google.” Look a little further, and market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But in my travels as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), I have discovered that in that .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines you have never seen. So many, in fact, that I have had to limit my list of the very best ones to a mere 100.

But it’s not just the sheer number of them that makes them worthy of attention; each one of these search engines has that standard “About Us” link at the bottom of the homepage. I call it the “why we’re better than Google” page. And after reading dozens and dozens of these pages, I have come to the conclusion that, taken as a whole, they are right!

Worth investigating these. There used to be several search engines that touted themselves as academic resources (Northernlights?), or as having cleverer algorithms than the big ones (Teoma?). I wouldn’t know what to look for any more, though. Do we actually need cleverer search engines, or is raw power all that matters?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 13:55 and is filed under General, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.