Pandia Post No. 25 Part 1

The Pandia Search Engine Awards 2004

(February 21 2005) Welcome to the 2004 Pandia Awards for the best search tools, search oriented sites and search engine documentation!

The guests have arrived, the orchestra have tuned their instruments, the audience is seated and the jury has delivered its verdict.

The best all round search engine

Google wins again

Yes, the winner is Google, again. Google continues to deliver good search results. Moreover, it continues to innovate, giving users tools that are genuinely useful, not only marketing gimmicks.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google.

We especially appreciate Google's support for advanced searching. The Google cheatcheet describes some of the more advanced operators.

Google's major problem is search engine spamming, i.e. webmasters that use illegitimate means of achieving good search engine rankings. Google's main tactic has been to reward web pages with real content and a lot of incoming links from popular "authoritative sites".

Now internet savvy webmasters generate pages that do contain "content", this being text stolen from other sites or directory listings fetched from the Open Directory and others. Ironically, they often produce these pages in order to display text ads from Google's own ad network: Adwords.

The large number of automatically generated pages also affects other areas. Try for instance searching for the company home page of a hotel. Google seldom presents this page as the number one result for a search for the hotel name and location. Instead it presents a large number of booking sites that allows you to book a room at the hotel. They are all legitimate and relevant, but not necessarily what you were looking for.

So this is where Google is most vulnerable. If any of its competitors finds a better way of handling spam, they may be able to deliver search results that are better than Google's.

Runners up

Indeed, Google is meeting stiff competition in this category. Both Yahoo! and MSN have developed new search engines lately, both of which deliver decent search results.

Old timer Ask Jeeves (powered by the Teoma search engine) may not generate the same number of search queries as the three big ones, but the site does provide some very useful search tools, indeed.

Look out for Gigablast

The Gigablast search engine, the little sibling of the big majors, has launched a new index containing some 1 billion web pages. The new database has also been significantly updated as regards freshness of content, making the search engine a real alternative.

Gigablast was founded by Matt Wells in 2000, and is now powering several search sites, including Clusty, Snap and Blingo.

Go to page 2: The best metasearch engine