I'd most rather, of the following, search with:
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AltaVista? (Score:3, Informative)
Because it has been shut down recently?
Re:AltaVista? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's still the best of the options listed.
It was, when it supported the NEAR keyword in its boolean searches (its support for brackets helped, too). When it dropped the NEAR keyword, it became no better than Google (of the same time) in its capabilities. Actually, it became worse than Google since it included a smaller subset of pages in its search.
I still miss that damn NEAR keyword. So I picked the "Some other (non-Google, non-Bing) option", since there was no other way to indicate a preference for the AltaVista of yesteryear.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for someone else that also misses the NEAR keyword which probably was the most useful search keyword ever.
The alternatives today are bleak, Google provides usually the best result, but from time to time it feels like it is missing some info - be it from censorship or inability to crawl Flash pages that many uses today is another question. Disabling SafeSearch is normal option, and the normal risk is to see some tits, which are harmless.
Bing is really not an alternative to Google - Baidu may provide b
Re:AltaVista? (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks for someone else that also misses the NEAR keyword which probably was the most useful search keyword ever.
Google search supports AROUND(n), which limits results to those pages on which the two words are within n words of each other.
Re:AltaVista? (Score:5, Informative)
FWIW, you can use near: on Bing queries - it's a bit limited, because it defaults to 10 words distance, but still better than nothing. See here [microsoft.com].
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Urkh. That is the first time MS gets something right. While I do not trust them one bit, I will try this out.
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Don't know what you are talking about. I get three results in Bing, all three of which point to slashdot and some guy called mcgrew.
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Indeed. "near" was incredible useful. Add boolean options and you found anything fast. Today, you only have the cretinized search interfaces, that find popular stuff fast, but are a pain for everything else. Even Google is badly broken, in particular when it thinks it knows better what I am looking for than I do. It is never right. Things I found with the original AltaVista in minutes now take hours of going through irrelevant crap.
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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/ [mozilla.org]
Missing option: (Score:5, Funny)
I submit my queries on Ask Slashdot and rely on the moderators lazyness.
Re:Missing option: (Score:5, Funny)
I find it useful to post something like "hey, Linux is so stupid, it can't even X", where "X" is something I've been unsuccessfully trying to do.
I almost always get instantaneous results. The replies not only tell me how much of an idiot I am for not knowing it, but they also include detailed instructions on how to accomplish "X". Much faster than using a search engine.
Re:Missing option: (Score:5, Funny)
I find it useful to post something like "hey, Linux is so stupid, it can't even X", where "X" is something I've been unsuccessfully trying to do.
I almost always get instantaneous results. The replies not only tell me how much of an idiot I am for not knowing it, but they also include detailed instructions on how to accomplish "X". Much faster than using a search engine.
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Linux is so stupid, it can't even get me a date with Emilia Clarke.
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Works for me. RTFM noob.
The luddite's Google: Card catalogs (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a luddite sometimes. Sometimes doing things the old-fashioned way is faster. I cut my teeth in school doing research in the library using its card catalog before it bought some awful online thing that ran on a PDP 11/45. Mercifully, they replaced it with something far more modern. And there were times when flipping through the cards was faster than using the computer. Then there is wandering through the stacks. Sometimes you don't know what you're looking for until you stumble upon it. If you didn't already know this, books are shelved according to subject. Books on similar or closely-related topics are going to be shelved close to each other.
Re:The luddite's Google: Card catalogs (Score:5, Funny)
I am a luddite sometimes. Sometimes doing things the old-fashioned way is faster. I cut my teeth in school doing research in the library using its card catalog before it bought some awful online thing that ran on a PDP 11/45. Mercifully, they replaced it with something far more modern. And there were times when flipping through the cards was faster than using the computer. Then there is wandering through the stacks. Sometimes you don't know what you're looking for until you stumble upon it. If you didn't already know this, books are shelved according to subject. Books on similar or closely-related topics are going to be shelved close to each other.
If you cut your teeth or gums you obviously were using the cards incorrectly. No wonder they switched to computers...
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Heh, yeah, sometimes I feel like a luddite for missing yahoo's old hand-assembled outline directory of the internet.
Re:The luddite's Google: Card catalogs (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, in the 1960s there was a conference entitled INTREX, for Information Transfer Experiments, that was sort of about library-like computer systems. One of the papers was a thoughtful examination of what it meant to "browse" in a library and how one would build a computerized "browsery." I don't know if any such thing was ever implemented, but it seems like a problem that hasn't been solved.
All the computer types assume that you want to do a targeted search and know what you are trying to find. All I can say is, I learned so much by going into the stacks to find specific book X and getting distracted by all the interesting books on related topics on the shelves around it.
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I often found more of what I wanted without knowing I wanted it by not finding what I wanted - in a real library.
These days searching via Google and the rest is too many times an exercise in frustration. While my search-fu is admittedly weak, I generally got better results up until the past year or two. I very much miss Kartoo and I never minded that it used Flash.
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All the computer types assume that you want to do a targeted search and know what you are trying to find. All I can say is, I learned so much by going into the stacks to find specific book X and getting distracted by all the interesting books on related topics on the shelves around it.
Yep, yep, yep. And that was the downfall of an ADHD person like me with a voracious curiosity. I found myself finding interesting books on topics unrelated to what I was researching and risked never getting anything done. It's much like that damned Wikipedia. Go to one article to learn about something, then click on a link and find oneself sucked into a completely different area. This curiosity proved to me that in order for me to be content all I need is a supply a food and water, a working toilet, an
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And leather, don't forget about the cover!
I still remember a time when the finest pages were written on calf skin [wikipedia.org], but I started to forget the times one was writing on reeds' pith [wikipedia.org] (no, carved stones don't make pages: at the most, they make a library).
(ducks)
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If you didn't already know this, books are shelved according to subject. Books on similar or closely-related topics are going to be shelved close to each other.
Search engines could be argued to be like an un-sorted Library, or a Library lacking a decent librarian.
So far as I know, no one has ever been able to create an automated cataloger or an automated librarian anywhere near as competent as a human one. Asking a question of a good reference librarian is worth one hundred Google searches.
Re:The luddite's Google: Card catalogs (Score:4, Interesting)
If you didn't already know this, books are shelved according to subject. Books on similar or closely-related topics are going to be shelved close to each other.
Search engines could be argued to be like an un-sorted Library, or a Library lacking a decent librarian.
So far as I know, no one has ever been able to create an automated cataloger or an automated librarian anywhere near as competent as a human one. Asking a question of a good reference librarian is worth one hundred Google searches.
Smart searchers try google once or twice, then head to the reference desk... [wikipedia.org]
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"Cut my teeth." God, I HATE that expression. Worse than "worth his salt."
Ok, ok. Yes, that term does get used too often and I admit that I should have used a better metaphor. If I could, I would change it to say, "I was potty trained using the card catalog". There!
Metacrawler still exists! (Score:5, Informative)
Once upon a time, when all search engines pretty much sucked, Metacrawler was the way to go. It still exists, though the hamsters must surely be tired after all these years...
Re:Metacrawler still exists! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm old enough (and have been at UW long enough) to have used Metacrawler back when it was still a University of Washington experimental offering. Later it became my first introduction to the wonderful world of a grant-developed product turning into a commercial windfall for someone - I felt betrayed when the ads and sponsored listings showed up.
I'm somewhat more inured to that situation now, but it does still bug me.
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Duck Duck Go (Score:5, Informative)
Dogpile isn't a rank and search engine, it's a bunch of them. Anyway Duck Duck Go.
Re:Duck Duck Go (Score:5)
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Re:Duck Duck Go (Score:5, Interesting)
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Agreed. I have startpage as my second default search engine on Firefox homepage. I do use DDG frequently, tho.
i like it (Score:2)
so I read this suggestion and tried Duck Duck Go and I dig it
I'm doing a 'startup' that involves screen printing. I constantly and experimenting with various exposure times and techniques for the screen and for dyeing processes.
Google goes to 3-5 results of 'tshirtforums.com' boards, which should be the first result. I can see why having multiple results from the same domain would help indicate depth of information to a non-technically proficient user, however for an advanced user I appreciate having just o
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You, a bunch of other posters, and a few moderators have apparently failed to see that this is a list of old search engines.
DDG would have a rightful place of search engines of the late oughties and early tens, but not the late nineties.
nerd names (Score:2)
Agree. Nerds should not be allowed to name the things they create.
These 'wacky' or esoteric names alienate users and cause linguistic anarchy. 'Google' is kind of borderline, in this context.
Yahoo is a good example. I thought it was cool, until I realize that they were losing customers and credibility because of their name.
If you make a thing and want others to use it, you need to design so the user can autodidact.
Users are usually in the Zone of
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Duck Duck Goose might be a well known childs game. To Americans.. It's the first time I've ever heard of it.
But words, they mean something, names and play on words not so much. To me as a 'foreigner' (Hello NSA), it's always struck me as interesting how American company names can be reflected as verbs in what we consider everyday technologies. Example: "To Xerox", or "To Google" for that matter.
Gopher (Score:5, Interesting)
Must have been around 1995.
I was working in Public Affairs for Navy Recruiting and was asked by a local town to take part in a 50th anniversary remembrance of the end of World War II. I used Gopher to find a heart-wrenching first-hand account of the attack on Pearl Harbor written by a former Navy Seaman shortly after the event had taken place. My presentation would be a dramatic reading of that document that I downloaded via Gopher.
As I took to the podium that night, right after actor Jim Nabors finished singing America the Beautiful, it suddenly dawned on me that in every place where the author of my speech referred to the Japanese, he did so with a racial epithet.
I began to sweat.
The hardest part of giving that speech was having to censor the document in real time to say "the Japanese" rather than to use the racial epithet from the original document. My audience was a small town in Alabama so it's quite possible nobody would have minded, but it would have bothered me to this day. How I didn't catch it while I read and practiced the speech is still a mystery to me; probably because it was such a common epithet that it is repeated in most historical documentaries or dramas about the time period that my mind just accepted it uncritically.
Gopher was a great tool and sometimes I miss the clean and not-heavily formatted text that Gopher delivered as opposed to the media-rich content delivered by http.
Re:Gopher (Score:5, Informative)
The guy who set up the poll obviously had no idea how gopher works - gopher isn't a search, it's a protocol for server assisted fetch; in many ways equivalent to http. It doesn't belong on the list more than http does.
Most searches of gopher towns are done through archie or veronica, one of which should have been the choice here instead of gopher.
But if they have a place, surely ftpsearch.ntnu.no should be there too. It was BIG.
It's also rather telling that when listing old search engines, HotBot isn't one of the choices, while a lot of less successful but better advertised and provider-specific options are.
Hotbot was probably the second biggest engine in the mid nineties, used a lot because it was so much faster than Altavista.
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And yes, hotbot was awesome! I was late to the google bandwagon as a holdout who just wouldn't give it up.
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The guy who set up the poll obviously had no idea how gopher works - gopher isn't a search, it's a protocol for server assisted fetch; in many ways equivalent to http. It doesn't belong on the list more than http does.
Most searches of gopher towns are done through archie or veronica, one of which should have been the choice here instead of gopher.
But if they have a place, surely ftpsearch.ntnu.no should be there too. It was BIG.
It's also rather telling that when listing old search engines, HotBot isn't one of the choices, while a lot of less successful but better advertised and provider-specific options are.
Hotbot was probably the second biggest engine in the mid nineties, used a lot because it was so much faster than Altavista.
HotBot was my go to search engine before Google came along. It had the best options for getting pretty specific results. Not sure why it was excluded and Ask Jeeves is an option.
I also used archie back in the internet days before we had this new fangled world wide web.
I'll assume those oversights were on purpose. What would a /. poll without some obvious mistake to complain about?
Duck Duck Go. (Score:5, Informative)
Duck Duck Go. Unlike most of those other options in the poll, it's new enough to take the last 10 to 15 years of search development or so into account.
Exalead (Score:3)
Another thing I've heard is competent is Exalead:
http://www.exalead.com/search/ [exalead.com]
I can't vouch for its output since I haven't really used it, but I heard about in a library science course. This of course means it readily takes many operators (NEAR, for instance), so it should be a good fit for Slashdot.
On another note: remember when Altavista required you to specify you wanted to +search +for +every +word? Then Google came along and did the same thing by default. Until it stopped. I really liked Google before
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Duck Duck Go. Unlike most of those other options in the poll, it's new enough to take the last 10 to 15 years of search development or so into account.
How is this +5 informative? You missed the context completely.
For the obligatory car anology, this is like a poll that lists "Maserati Berlinetta", "Ford Thunderbird" and "Studebaker Starliner", and you say it should have Bugatti Veyron.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
WAIS (Score:2)
CNIDR WAIS, that is.
They should have added Bing (Score:3)
Two hands and a flashlight. (Score:3)
It's how I find my ass - I usually keep him out in the barn...
I don't need a stinking search engine .. (Score:2)
Re:I don't need a stinking search engine .. (Score:4, Funny)
That would require an area of Post-Its equivalent to a square over 250 foot on a side. I assume you multi-layer?
HotBot.com (Score:3)
Because in the late nineties it was rather impressive, and the layout appealed to my WIRED-intoxicated, angsty-cypherpunk teen self.
Such a shame... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to use Altavista almost exclusively until someone on alt.hacker pointed me in the direction of Google about 15 years ago. It's a pity what's happened to all those other web search systems:
Altavista and Webcrawler are now merely front-ends for Yahoo.
Dogpile aggregates Yahoo, Google and Yandex.
Infoseek is no more and Gopher is almost impossible to find.
So realistically, those poll options boil down to Yahoo, Yandex, Ask and Lycos.
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And Yahoo is "Powered by Bing."
Stupid poll (Score:2)
"I'd most rather, of the following, search with:"
Some site that uses English as a language, rather than translated from some other tongue (Yodish?)
Anyway it depends on what you are searching for - if I was searching for some product I was planning on buying I would go to Amazon since I have a (prime) account there, and they aren't based in this state (so no sales tax)
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Amazon has the worst search engine of any shopping site I've used. If I'm shopping for tech, I browse through categories on newegg or pricewatch first, even if I end up buying from amazon.
Gopher isn't a search engine (Score:5, Informative)
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You search Gopherspace with Veronica [wikipedia.org].
or Archie, but yeah. I had to go look that up real quick to refresh my memory or I would have posted that sooner.
Mod parent up, 100% fact and again shows how clueless the /. poll editor(s) are.
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Aww man, thanks so much for mentioning that FAQ. That brings back memories. I remember using it back when it was "Doctor Bob's Guide to Offline Internet Access". It helped me out loads when my college blocked port 80 because "people were abusing it"
Startpage. (Score:2)
I end up use google maybe one time out of twenty (often for obtuse linux or bsd problems), but for day to day searching it works, has a good privacy policy and an https option.
WTF (Score:2)
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This are all search engines that had their heydays before Google took over, and well before Bing was even conceived.
For me it's AltaVista because the rest is from before even my time. And I suspect that accounts for a large part of the /. populous.
Here's another idea for a poll: (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather travel to Brazil by the following options:
* walking
* hands and knees
* skateboard
* pogo stick
* Space hopper
* Some other non-airplane option
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I'd rather beat: /. poll editor
- a pillow
- a punching bag
- a rug
- an egg
- a
- some other inanimate object not listed here
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Walking is easier. It just takes waaaay more time and it's probably even colder than swimming.
Good ole Jeeves (Score:2)
Jeeves just because that's what I used back in high school (back when most people I knew thought you had to write your search in the form of a question).
Symbol Hound (Score:4, Informative)
Startpage/IxQuick (Score:3)
Alt answer: (Score:2, Funny)
Ask CowboyNeal
Webcrawler doesn't count (Score:2)
Webcrawler uses Google and Yahoo these days. Way back in the mid-1990s Webcrawler was the search engine I used the most but that ended when Google took over the internet.
Hotbot (Inktomi) (Score:2)
That was a pretty good search engine a while back.
Overlord Search - We've got it all. (Score:2)
I'd like to use the secret monster search engine the NSA and others share... instead of the lame censored results from Google, Bing, et al.
What the heck is Red Mercury, for example? Is it something real, or disinformation, etc.
Set the time parameters to 1963, and see what really happened in Dallas, etc...
All these results and more with the NSA/CIA/DIA/NRO/MI5/MI6/Mossad Database to rule them all.... Operation Overlord. ;-)
PS: Please, please don't kill me if I happened to get lucky and guess some classifie
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What the heck is Red Mercury, for example?
It sounds like a sci-fi novel from around 1952...
Help me out here... (Score:2)
What's wrong with Google again, that isn't wrong with every single other option listed?
If anyone says "privacy," and the recommends any search provider based in the US, UK, or Europe... they're getting smacked with a fish. I don't know how. I don't know when. But I will find a way.
Yippy/Clusty (Score:3)
I've used Clusty/Yippy http://clusty.com/ [clusty.com] for years. I like the aggregation on the left side.
startpage (Score:2)
Used to be AlltheWeb.com (Score:2)
I found AlltheWeb.com [wikipedia.org] to be the best search engine before the rise of Google. Sadly, they seem to have been acquired by Yahoo and folded into the Borg of Futility.
Hmmm...don't know... (Score:2)
Altavista (Score:3)
for giving an exact search by default, and not hiding it behind a 'verbatim' button 2 menus deep. Also for not trying to get their grubby hands on all of my private data via dubious 'cloud' offerings.
Missing option: Hotbot (Score:2)
I remember that search engine was da shit before Google came along.
Hotbot (Score:2)
Hotbot - at the time, it was the one one could configure the most to try and tune the search. it grew up within Lycos and at the times of the first dot com buble also had a webmail aggregate, and other services.
AltaVista... (Score:2)
I remember when AltaVista was the best search engine before google started.
It was quick and did have quite a lot of results, but that was in the day when a search term returned a limited number of pages and you could technically reach the end of the search results.
Ahhh... Information overload. Love it.
Wolfram Alpha (Score:2, Informative)
The forgotten Tech Search Engine for STEM research.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
Duck Duck Go (Score:2)
I've been using Duck Duck Go since before it was paranoid to do so.
Grep (Score:3)
Wikipedia (Score:2)
It's my second-favorite search engine, after Google. Think of it like dmoz,or like Yahoo used to be: A collection of links found by real people.
All those things people prefer are suggested to search in those Bing ads, I'd rather search with Wikipedia. Like "honeybee".
Poor Excite (Score:3)
hotbot! (Score:2)
Hmm (Score:2)
A cleaned up Google, circa 2002/4ish. Sometime before the SEOs and algorithmic tweakings largely destroyed its utility for me.
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That you have no sense of nostalgia?
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that you need to learn how to the internet.
Some people have accidentally that.
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Okay, granted. I'm just saying that the pat reason for not using Google and Bing that 90+% of people are going to ignorantly spout (privacy) is a dumb reason, because none of the other options are more secure, or any more private than the first two. Not one of them is. And, reading through the thread, not one poster has proposed anything that actually would be secure or private.
There are a plethora of other reasons though. Why not be creative, and think out a plausible reason this would be an issue to begi
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Wow, nice catch. Now I also pulled Astalavista from the back of my faint memories.
Amazingly, the site seems to still be there: http://astalavista.box.sk/ [astalavista.box.sk].
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... I'd most rather, of the following, have:
- gonorrhea
- chlamydia
- syphillis
Out of the three, you'd much prefer the clap. It's easily curable, and doesn't cause as many lasting damages as the pox and clammy. That it's more painful than either just means it tends to get treated quicker.
Translated to the poll, you should probably pick altavista.digital.com
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but an awful lot of the time I find a wikipedia search is all I need to either get the information I want or the link I want.
[Citation needed]
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+1 for DuckDuckGo.
Silly poll.