I use Google® for my internet searching.

But it occurs to me that that's more from force of habit than from anything else. I've never even looked at the search engines from yahoo, MSN, AOL and ask.com, much less actually tried them.

Are they all pretty much the same? Can anyone comment, from experience, on whether any search engine is significantly better or worse than any other, either generally or in any particular area?

Thanks!

At one time any search engine only looked for certain things and to have the best chance of finding what you wanted you needed to use several or to use one of the programs that looked at all search engine for you. I used to use one of these and it would take maybe a couple of minutes to check all the search engines.

The came Google which is supposed to do a similar job but did it in about half a second. So I switched to Google and now use it exclusively.

I started using Google back when it was in beta (back in late '98 or early '99. I still remember fondly when somebody, ca. '95, sent me an email about Lycos, a once popular search engine. I found Yahoo, a little while after. At first, there was a battle for mind share: index everything and work on search algorithms (Lycos, Altavista, HotBot) or try to organize everything on the Web into an ontology (or, hierarchical outline of knowledge). When Google appeared, they offered something new: not just indexing everything and weighting them equally, by meta tags, or by date, but by popularity. They determined that the more popular a page was the more incoming links it would have, and that's pretty much the same today. Then, I remember Ask Jeeves, later morphed into Ask: they alleged to develop a natural language interface to search through rather than keywords, but, in the end, they relied on tracking people's queries (NL questions) and optimizing on those.

Then there's some interesting, but seemingly unknown search engines: e.g., Kartoo, that gives you a map of keywords you've searched on. For a while, it looked like meta-search-engines, e.g., DogPile, were the way to go. Search on one website, was farmed out to different search engines, and the results were aggregated back on the master website.

Recently, blogs, and other aggregators of news, links, etc., have been taking some of the mindshare that once was the domain of newsgroups and search engines. I still like to browse through Yahoo-style directories occasionally, e.g., dmoz.

One of the coolest things about Google, is its ability to keep innovative by changing its pageranking algorithms, and coming up with new technologies that complement their existing ones.

Judging by my referrer logs, the last time I studied them, Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the search engine spiders that crawl my website the most.

Z, how do you check your referrer logs? I'd love to check them both for Wordcraft and for my work Web site.

how do you check your referrer logs?

You need to talk with your sys admin or whoever set up those websites. But, usually, the logs are placed somewhere on the same machine that the web server is running on. Depends on what server is being run, too. The files are simple text, and by default usually show you the IP address (or domain name) of the client accessing the page, the time and date, the particular page, the web client being used, and the URL of the page from which the request came. It's this URL that typically shows the search query as part of the URL. For example:

quote:

66.249.65.212 - - [02/Apr/2006:09:40:01 -0700] "GET /ujg_archives/2005_01.html HTTP/1.1" 200 14183 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

There's software that analyzes the data for you and puts it all into nice little graphs. Send me a PM or give me a call and we can discuss it.

I use Google Analytics for my site stats. They show that 83% of traffic comes from search engines. 70% of the traffic is from Google itself, so 13% comes from all the other SEs combined. Yahoo accounts for 5% and MSN and AOL each refer 2% of visitors.