Searching
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Search – the second most performed activity on the internet (after email).
So, how is your search working for you?
Spam results are so irritating, and getting more prevalant as the web grows.
Where else can you search?
Google tips and tricks
Well, most people start at google and do their first search there and, depending, you either find something or you don’t.
I would also try the groups search on Google. Groups is like a place where they store a lot of forums where there is only user contributed questions, answers, discussions, so you won’t find spam.
Independent Directory
Another brilliant rarely used feature is the Google Directory associated with the open-directory dmoz.org – Now, a directory is basically what it says – a directory of links. The best thing is that it is human-edited, so there won’t be any spam results. It’s just good clean links – things you won’t find easily on a search engine!
A user based directory can be the most useful search you will ever do. It usually has rare results of speciality (or vertical) categories.
- del.icio.us – A huge directory of user based bookmarks. You can do searches here too. Good results.
- digg.com is another site where users ‘digg’ what they… um, dig (like). And then the articles/links submitted get rated from that.
Google not working for you?
Try this selection of searchs that should serve you well:
- Yahoo! – They have a lot of free services over above good searches. There is a directory too, ask Yahoo!, kids, a notepad / calendar / address book along with email. and many, many more.
Here is a list of Everything Yahoo - Ask Jeeves – a very smart search. Almost as many services as Yahoo has!
Meta Searches
Search engines that take their results from many search engines to find the best one’s out of them all.
- Jux2
- Dogpile
- Clusty – uses clustering of results into logical result ‘clusters’
- mamma – searches using all the alternative search engines
More Info
There is a website searchenginewatch who had a Best Of 2005 awards – here are the results.