Do we need 2 googles?

[Joe Barker]

I've heard that AltaVista put Raging.com up because Google was drawing
away so much business.  Whether this is factual, I wonder if the world
needs another search engine that ranks by links to sites.

Google is one of my favorite places to start most searches, because its
ranking so often brings up what I'm looking for.  Ixquick is equally good
as a place to start, and it provides a different type of information,
because its ranking synthesizes how all its search engines rank.

The downside of Google searching is that it reflects not so much content -
exact words on the page - as it reflects what others think of a site,
perhaps based on content, perhaps based on many other factors.  This is
useful, but it also brings up a large quantity of frequently visited sites
that pretty scary, from the point of view of reliability.

What we need is more heft for the difficult topics, where you want an
aspect of topic, or where the words are pretty common and phrases
don't zero in very well.

I don't think Raging.com is heading in this direction, and it will be hard
for it to surpass Google.  If it does, do we need it?  For what types of
saerches?

AltaVista advanced search, with its sorting/filtering/ranking sub-search,
it one of the best next places to go for harder topics.  Northern Light is
another.  Infoseek would be if its database were larger.  Copernic as a
metasearcher that allows refining (sub-searching) is also powerful
(http://www.copernic.com -- you download it for free).

I'm pleased with what Raging.com did with my own ego search, but that
doesn't mean much.  I know where I am.  For more about good places to
start and next places to go as a search strategy, I suggest the page and
tutorial found starting at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Help/search.html

Do we need another google?

Joe Barker
Web Instruction Program Coordinator
Teaching Library, UC Berkeley