The Searchers

Culture | March 29th, 2017

Searching on the Internet has become so commonplace today that I have forgotten what computing life was like without it. The amount of online information available to us is staggering.

Now we have a different problem. How do we get our heads around the few paragraphs out there that we need for a book report, a research paper, or just plain curiosity? What method do we use to sort through the millions of web sites on the Internet to find ”How many green M & M’s are there in an 8 ounce bag?”

The Answer: Google It.

”That’s it, be a good little boy and Google it.” is what my mother would have said if Google were around in her time. Well, there are always more ways to complete your computer chores than just one search engine.

The fact is there are dozens of search engines and many more very specialized engines that few of us have access to. I want to make you aware of just a few of the more common ones to help you with your work. Let me know if you have a favorite and if we get some different responses, I’ll post them here next week.

Bing has about 15% of the search market. It is a Microsoft product and also powers Yahoo’s search engine. Bing’s video search is significantly better than Google’s, giving you a grid of large thumbnails that you can click on to play or preview if you hover over them. Bing often gives twice as many autocomplete suggestions than Google does. Bing can predict when airfares are about to go up or down if you’re searching for flights.

DuckDuckGo The key feature of DuckDuckGo is that it doesn’t retain its users’ data, so it won’t track you or manipulate results based on your behavior. So if you’re particularly spooked by Google’s all-seeing, all-knowing eye, this might be the one for you. Trust me, Google sees everything you do on your computer.

Quora Ask any question and its erudite community will offer their replies. Or you can choose from any similar queries previously asked. Example: What is the best restaurant in Fargo-Moorhead? This is a different type of search engine altogether but one that has its place.

Dogpile may look like a search engine you cobbled together with clip-art, but that’s rather the point, as it pulls in and organizes results from various different engines including Google, Yandex and Yahoo, but removes all the ads. If you don’t like looking at ads on your search engine page then Dogpile is for you.

Yandex is a Russian portal, offering many products and services similar to Google, and it’s the dominant search engine in Russia. It offers results in a nice logical format, replete with icons so you can clearly see the various channels for your queries.

Boardreader gets into the nitty-gritty of a subject with a variety of different points of view away from the major publications. Boardreadersurfaces results purely from forums, message boards and, of course, Reddit.Redditis known as the front page of the internet.

Visiting these search engine pages will keep you busy for many days. Explore them and others you may find and, as I said above, let me know about the different and strange engines that you find.

The next time you find yourself at the library make sure you sign up. The F-M libraries have subscriptions to large databases that you can’t normally get into. They may come in handy some day!

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