What Makes a Good Search Engine? Rogers AR

Posted by : James Mathewson The vast majority of users navigate the Web via search engines. Yet searching can be the most frustrating activity using a browser. Type in a keyword or phrase, and you're likely to get thousands of responses, only a handful of which are close to what you're looking for. And those are located on secondary search pages, only after a set of sponsored links or paid-for-position advertisements.

Still, search engines have come a long way in the past few years. Google developed a sophisticated algorithm that measures the popularity of pages on the Web and posts those listings first in search results. It also separated sponsored links from paid positions to give users a better sense of which pages are advertiser-driven. Ask Jeeves developed a natural language interface that allows users to ask direct questions. AllTheWeb boasts a comprehensive index of Web sites, resulting in a larger list of search results. And metasearch engines like Dogpile list results from those three and others for even more comprehensive searches. And there are dozens of others.

So which search engine should you use regularly? My new favorite is Teoma--the engine behind Ask Jeeves and others. After using the engine for a couple of weeks, I was so impressed with the quality of the search results that I just had to talk with folks from Ask Jeeves. In doing the research, I found out that Teoma is owned by Ask Jeeves properties.

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