The Searchers

internet

If you wanted to find information about Natalie Wood, who co-starred with John Wayne in The Searchers, among other films, where would you go? As this interesting article from the Guardian about search engine technology indicates, for 42% of us, first port of call is Google. This is particularly true of Safari users, who have a Google search box in the top right hand corner of the browser by default.

I use it a lot myself, and have done since it was an infant, so I'm obviously fairly happy with it, though it's true that good results are harder to come by as the web gets increasingly clogged with filth and cant. On the other hand, as I indicate below, alltheweb.com works better for image searches.

But two engines mentioned in the Guardian article are also of interest. Teoma claims to offer results based on authority, and groups resources relating to the search together, where available. By "resources" they mean collections of useful links other people have assembled - people interested in guitar technique, for example. Clusty, also groups search results together, by subject. This means if you're searching for a common set of words, you get less ambiguity, because the various interpretations are offered on the left side of the results screen. Searching for "hoses of the holy," for example, offers various ways in which "hoses" and "holy" appear on the web.

Only time will tell if I'll find either of these two as quick and easy as google, but it's nice to have alternatives, and I'll certainly be trying them out over the coming weeks.