Breaking the GooglePlex (or) Growing Up Google
Depending on who you ask, Google accounts for between 40 and 50-something percent of the search engine market (add in Yahoo and MSN and the figure jumps to around 90 percent). And rightly so—the service gives speedy results and has a very good user interface.
But don’t you ever want to try a different search engine, just to see where it takes you? After all, Google’s search results are based on relevance and popularity, so scrolling through Google results isn’t the best way to get off the beaten path and discover new Web territory.
Here, for your surfing pleasure, are 3 ways to do just that. Included in our list are sites like ChaCha.com where a real live “Guide” takes your query and returns related results tailor-made to your specifications. The service is free, and is quirky enough to be a lot of fun (a friend of mine learned first-hand that if you flirt with your guide, sometimes they’ll flirt back, though of course that’s against ChaCha policy). The service doesn’t require any registration, and it’s completely free.
StumbleUpon gives you thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons in your toolbar and lets you rate pages and sites you come across. As StumbleUpon learns your preferences, it gets better at directing you to stuff you’ll like. There’s also a social aspect; you can add other people with similar interests to your friends list, and their preferences will further refine your search results. StumbleUpon’s Web site can be slow at times, but it’s a great way to find Web content you wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise.
Ms. Dewey is more of a sexy, playful search engine than a useful one. Yes, that is the strangest thing yet typed on this blog. Ms. Dewey is a flirtatious interface for Windows Live Search, which uses an actress’s canned video responses and phrases to interact with users. The search engine was quite slow, though, and results are displayed in a relatively small window that is cumbersome to scroll through. We can only assume that the main draw of this search method is Ms. Dewey herself.
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