[Tfug] OT:Any Free Search Engines?

[Nate]

I've been slightly involved in some SEO projects, so I'm not an expert,
but I'm pretty sure Google is still pretty legit.  The issue is that
people have learned how to exploit google's rankings and so they know
how to push their sites up in the lists.  Hence the fact that the entire
SEO industry even exists.  I also have been a "paid customer" of google
before in buying traffic, and can attest to the fact that while we
shelled out a ton of money to get our little text ad included in the
advertising spaces on Google (above and to the right of the results,
clearly marked) it didn't help our actual (organic) ranking at all.
It's a constant arms race as people learn the tricks, then Google
changes things to try to shut them down and return the rankings to
something more useful.  On either side it's black magic to me.

Wikipedia is displayed so prominently simply because tons of people link
to it from all over.  Google Pagerank is heavily influenced by the
number of distinct web sites that link to a certain page.  Other than
that, wikipedia is very good at how they display their info (titles, met
tags, page content, etc) so that it is favored by google.  Either way, I
find it highly convenient to know that just about anything I search for
has a wikipedia page so I don't have to use wikipedia's slow search, or
preface my google searches with "wikipedia something something" every
time like I used to =)

To answer your question, though, there was a lot of buzz around
www.cuil.com awhile back and there's a lot of recent buzz around Wolfram
Alpha, but that isn't out yet to the general public from what I can tell.

Nate

Charles R. Kiss wrote:
> 
> I googled "Beethoven 3 mp3 download" and other combinations including
> other words like, "free, scherzo," etc. thinking that there would be
> many many versions, all over the world, of one of Beethoven's most
> popular compositions -and that I would be able to download legally for
> FREE.  I imagined high schools, universities, and other entities would
> have legally produced and uploaded their versions.
> 
> However I found NONE.
> 
> It occurred to me that maybe Google has already sold so much of its
> "soul", and had already so many commitments, that the first 10,000 hits
> were all, in some way, paying Google customers, or vice versa.  And that
> now, much of the search space is saturated with Googloids, and doing a
> real search for information on the internet using Google is hardly
> "representational."
> 
> For example, Wikipedia is in Googles back pocket: always ends up in the
> top three, etc.
> 
> Are there any more interesting search engines out there that don't have
> "conflicts of interest" issues with entities that fill "their results"?
> 
> What are people using?  What's a truly free, as in independent, search
> engine. Like Google used to be.
> 
> Know what I mean?
> 
> Thanks!
> Charles