Singing Loudly

Google isn't the only good search engine. For a while many people have considered it one of the best search engines. I think that comes from their search algorithm that produces, on most occasions, very accurate matches and the speed of the search. It has been awhile since Google has added much to its search options, making me question whether it is the best search engine.

There are at least three other search engines that are experimenting with different search options. Options that are quite handy. A9.com is the search engine owned by Amazon.com. If you use it you'll get, I think, 1.2% off your purchases at Amazon.com. More importantly A9 allows you to personalize your search. This creates a history for you which saves and later tells you whether the site is new or has been clicked on (and will tell you when you last clicked it). Bookmarks you save can be accessed from any computer. Best of all their results come from a variety of sources: the web results are powered by Google, Amazon delivers inside the book results, and internet movie database information and gurunet are also included.

Also, Ask Jeeves (remember before Google it was the most popular search engine for awhile) has recently added a personalized function to searching.

Finally, Mark Cuban and one of his companies have been developing a new search engine. Icerocket allows you to see a thumbnail of all the website hits it pulls for you in your search. This allows you to see if it is what you are looking for before you click on the site. This is a great feature if you fear popups or dangerous scripts because you can tell if it's where you want to go or not. Another feature that I like is the find a friend feature. You can see search for friends registered on sites like face the jury, hot or not, and other post your photo sites.

Even though there are alternatives out there, Google is certainly not out of the race. They have recently been hiring a gaggle of new engineers, which is making some people suspect that we'll soon see a google web browser. There is a little evidence to support it: the new hirings and registering gbrowser.com. There are other explanations for those besides making a new browser. Besides, you can already have a great browser if you just download Firefox.

So what are you waiting for! Get to searching!