In Google we trust

[dArKeR]

In five mind-blowing years, Google has blossomed from a nerdy college experiment to a mainstream sensation so ubiquitous that its goofy name is now synonymous with looking things up.

Millions of people turn to the internet search engine every hour, trusting Google to speed through its index of three-billion web pages to find just about anything imaginable.

Google's seemingly mystical powers inspires awe and dread -- reverence for the search engine's apparent omniscience, and fear about its Big Brother potential.

"It's way too powerful," said Daniel Brandt, a fierce Google critic who started a website to air his misgivings. "It's scary because if Google drops you, you could be out of business in no time."

http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=18297

Google was the first toon I made on below site.
http://darkerxdarker.tripod.com/

[disgruntella]

1. google's popularity

I remember what search engines were like when Google first came out - to me it stood out because of its bare bones approach. I had done some research papers on search engines as projects in graduate school (library & information science). Former favorites of mine (altavista, hotbot) were crowding their home pages with ads, special features, "content", all sorts of branding garbage. Then there was google: a single graphic and a single textbox. Talk about utility! And lightning speed!

I don't really understand complaints about Google's ranking system - no search engine is going to survive without some means of ranking results. And web developers are always going to find some way of trying to trick the search engine into listing their site at the top, no matter what ranking system is chosen. Google lets the people decide.

[pw]

2. Google ranking system

Although the claims are by people I'm not sure I believe, the fear is that Google doesn't really let the people decide -- it adjusts its algorithm so that some links to a page count for more than others, and it does it arbitrarily.

On the one hand I can see how any fixed algorithm could be gamed by peopple determined to be tops in the rankings. On the other hand, it is a little scary to think that a few keystrokes from a programmer somewhere in california could effectively wipe some sites from the web.

[dArKeR]

3. I'm pretty sure I've gotten diff results when putting in the exact keyword

at different times. Like somehow, depending on traffic your search goes to a different distributed computer?

[SoCalDem]

4. and I get different results when using different browsers

I likes them better when they were not so "popular".. Their news site was better too when it was in the beta format..:)

[demgrrrll]

5. I received an e mail offering special key words for my business that

would assure many google hits. They were selling the special words.
Does anyone know anything about this program?

[chadm]

6. Ranking isn't necessary

Check out http://news.infobeing.net. Because it is a real-time messaging agent rather than a search engine, relevant messages are sent without a need to rank them.

[disgruntella]

10. thanks for the link for infobeing

I might sign up, just to see what kind of results I get -- but if it's one of those sites that's push-only (sends messages but doesn't let you search) then it's not as convenient as a search engine to me. Nothing like a single graphic, a single text box, and a search button. (Of course google has more than that now, but it's still a clean design)

Also, regarding Google's pay-for-placement -- I don't think there's a household-name search engine out there that's doesn't use this as part of their funding strategy (I'm not talking about using payment as the SOLE ranking criteria though, I am not convinced Google does that)

That said, let me plug my favorite NON-commercial web directory:
http://www.lii.org/

[sandnsea]

7. I think paid links boost ratings

My sites got into all the search engines ages ago, so they come up good in paid search engines as well as nonpay. I think that's one of the criteria Google uses to give web sites a bump and none of them know I don't pay anybody because I've just been in all of them so long. Google used to be a pretty good straight up search engine. But lately I've noticed a whole lot more corporate sites and a whole lot less individual sites, leading me to my pay link boost conclusion. You just can't find the funky homemade web sites much anymore and while they were sometimes annoying, alot of them were really good and were also supposed to provide a level playing field between corporate and entrepreneur. Now, all the search engines are pretty much massive corporate pages or pages stored on corporate servers or pages stored on government and education servers.

So, if somebody wants a new search engine idea, something that only lists noncorporate sites and anybody that is in the top ten of a paid engine automatically gets kicked out. Then we might have more of that great equalizer the internet was supposed to provide.

[SoCalDem]

8. I love the funky little off beat sites

I find them a lot of the time by googling pictures.. The odder the pic, the odder the site :)

and sometimes I find them by mis-spelling or typos :)

[SoCalDem]

9. I love the funky little off beat sites

I find them a lot of the time by googling pictures.. The odder the pic, the odder the site :)

and sometimes I find them by mis-spelling or typos :)