C|Net Reviews Search Engines
I’m surprised this didn’t get a bunch of blog posts when it came out on May 9: C|Net went out and did comprehensive reviews of nine top search engines. This via Gary Stein, who says “the headline promised to help you find a search engine better than Google”, but Google winds up the winner anyways.
| Search Engine | Rating | User rating | Review points |
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8.0 | 7.4 | gets points for clearly delineated ads, loses for lackluster multimedia search (mentions Google not having search history, which it now does) |
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7.7 | 8.0 | Plusses include top-notch local search, negatives include poor smart answers |
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6.7 | 8.8 | Really likes the advanced features like columns and user history, but discouraged by close relationship with Alexa and lack of multimedia search |
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6.3 | n/a | Good smart answers, Snapshot area, multimedia search, but no cache and limits for non-AOL members |
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6.3 | n/a | Gets good marks for smart answers, MyJeeves and Binoculars previews, but loses on multimedia and local search |
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6.0 | n/a | Usage of other MSN services and highlight viewer make it a contender, but lack of secondary searches like local, multimedia or people keep it from winning |
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5.7 | n/a | good interface and multimedia search, back lack of local or cache and ads too easily mixed with search results |
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5.3 | n/a | While the reviewer likes their people and forum search, the regular search is a complete anachronistic mess |
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5.0 | n/a | Fans of periodical search and Furl, but not liking the lack of extra searches (including image, media, people, local) |
They’ve also got a very interesting feature comparison chart.
Interesting how, while Google has more users, those who have chosen Yahoo or A9 as their primary search engine actually seem more satisfied than Google’s users. Meanwhile, most of the other engines don’t even have fans. Also, C|Net might want to do a better job feeding this kind of stuff to bloggers (I know plenty of guys who would have linked to it weeks ago).
C|Net Does Review of 9 Search Engines
C|Net has published a review of nine search engines. At RustySearch, we only asked you to rate four engines, GYMA, (which I have 8,922 rated search, almost there, please rate more). InsideGoogle has a nice recap of the review posted…
Trackback by Search Engine Roundtable | June 1, 2005
All The Web and Wisenut were absent
- also -
it would have been nice to get an updated opinion on Mindset
Comment by Search-engines-web.com | June 2, 2005
Some of the Editor review comments are obselete today. E.g. “Google does not have seach history”. The user reviews are largely trash and cannot be counted.
Comment by Ram | June 3, 2005
I agree with Search-engines-web.com, and I would suggest replacing A9, Altavista and Lycos with All The Web, Wisenut, and Gigablast since A9 uses Google’s search results, Altavista uses results from Yahoo! and Lycos uses search results from Ask Jeeves. And, AOL uses Google for its search results.
The Yahoo! Mindset beta search engine looks very promising, using a more powerful and intuitive alglorithm than Google is using to decide which web pages are the most relevant to a particular user.
Comment by Skramstad Internet Advertising | June 6, 2005