October 25, 2001

9:21 AM

AltaVista's catalog of 500 million Web pages hasn't been fully updated since July. AV used to be my search engine of choice, then (for a short time) Hotbot, and now Google. What will the search engine look like that replaces Google?
posted by tranquileye (9 comments total)

Here's what wired thinks of the issue: Searching for Googles Sucessor. As Lasoo's CTO however, I would never call us a sucessor to Google, merely a complementary technology. A search engine that is focused on local content instead of general topics. We are however introducing a new "Google-like" link that people can embed on their web pages. Lasoo
posted by pforth at 9:51 AM on October 25, 2001

My new fav is ilor. It is powered by google but it does other tricks.
posted by mmm at 9:51 AM on October 25, 2001

hard to imagine -- i love google. maybe something like Vivismo?
posted by locombia at 9:54 AM on October 25, 2001

Altavista was almost always my search engine of choice. I think I used Yahoo once and hated it. By the time I noticed that the altavista.digital.com shortcut was redirecting me to atavista.com - when Compaq bought it, I was already using Google.

Now I use both Google and Teoma. I never used Ask Jeeves, which has just aquired Teoma, but the Teoma engine is a pretty good one.
posted by Hexaemeron at 10:04 AM on October 25, 2001

alltheweb *is* fast - but its results aren't as relevant as google's ... at least, now - because i find google isn't as good as it used to be, but i just can't figure out why ...
posted by aureliano buendia at 10:05 AM on October 25, 2001

I think you'll see divergence rather than confluence - search engines devoted to specific, albeit large, topics. Example, a search engine that might be devoted entirely to politics, or business. The web is getting too big for one site to effectively search, I think, and people are getting away from using the bundled "services" that places like MSN, Yahoo and Excite have - the public is becoming sophisticated enough with the net to take what they want and leave the rest, rather than rely on a single place for everything. Google's stripped down interface is a symptom of that general trend.
posted by UncleFes at 11:22 AM on October 25, 2001

Using Wisenut till I learn of a new engine of the moment.
posted by neo452 at 11:23 AM on October 25, 2001

meta search, perhaps? debriefing.com looks interesting, and it's purty too.
posted by modge at 11:52 AM on October 25, 2001

pforth, that's a pretty impressive site. It actually has information on my little crappy town in it! Now to forward the cable company to that site so that they know where the name of my town is located (most of the maps I've seen don't show it).
posted by shepd at 12:57 PM on October 25, 2001