|
BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE: DAILY BRIEFING | |||||||||||
| |||||||||||
|
BW ONLINE DAILY BRIEFING |
 | |
 | |
 |
||||||
Google Can End Your Search for a Great Search Site It doesn't pretend to be a portal -- just a better way to find stuff on the Net Search sites are becoming the forgotten engine of the Internet economy. It wasn't always so. Back in the mid 1990s, these sites were the rage. Yahoo! was born in 1994 and quickly became a Web giant. Competitors Lycos, Excite, and Infoseek appeared as well. The opening pages of these sites became the entrance gate to the entire Internet for millions of surfers. And then the term "portal" was coined, and suddenly the search page was just one of many services offered by these sites. Soon, a site's search capability became a commodity and was farmed out to specialists such as Inktomi, which boasted a more robust technology that helped the portals more closely track their customers. It was about then that Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- with unfortunate timing -- came calling at the major portal sites. The two were computer science grad students at Stanford University who thought they had stumbled across a better way to search the Internet. Rather than looking for keywords, their system looked for pages that linked to other pages to determine the significance of those other pages. Although the technique seemed obtuse, its results were quantifiably more accurate than those of any search engine then available. BUILD OUR OWN. The reaction from the portal execs? "We showed it to all the major search engines, but in the end we realized that they weren't interested in searching anymore," says Brin. "We decided that we would rather build our own search engine instead." The result is Google.com, which just may be the best search site yet launched. It has quickly attracted the attention of computer professionals and, if marketed well, could become a favorite of average Web surfers, too. Google's primary strengths are speed and accuracy, the former achieved by what has become a time-honored method for search engines -- storing a huge chunk of the Internet on its own servers: Every few days, Google's 2,000 servers download more than 200 million documents. Still, why choose Google over its more polished and more experienced brethren? To answer that question, I designed a semi-scientific test. I chose five things to look for and then searched using the same terms on each of nine different search engines (AskJeeves, Excite, Google, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, NortherLight, and Yahoo). If I didn't find the relevant page on the first try, I would use a set of identical secondary terms for a second search. I timed each search and then ranked each site based on how long it took to find the page I was looking for and what ranking it gave that page in its results. CONSISTENT WINNER. The results varied considerably. Each of the sites has its weaknesses, depending on what kind of topic you're looking for. For instance, when I searched for "molecular composition of table sugar," AskJeeves.com came in second because it tends to answer questions like that well. But when I was searching for the home page of a high school friend of mine, AskJeeves came in last. One site was consistent though. Google came in first in each of my five searches. Not only did it come in first but it blew away the competition. Google presented the page I was looking for as the first or second listing in four of my five searches. In the fifth search, I had to go to the second page of searches to find it. None of the other sites listed my target page on their first page of listings more than once. In fact, the time it took to find the five target pages on all of the other seven was at least double the 2 minutes and 27 seconds to find the five pages on Google. I don't want to list the times of the other sites, since this test shouldn't be taken as some scientific ranking of search sites. But it clearly showed that Google has powerful technology behind it. CLEAN SHEET. It has some other tricks that I didn't use during my test. For instance, let's say you've just done a search for "dinosaur fossils" to find information about fossil hunting in Montana. The page that you're looking for doesn't show up, but a page about dinosaur sleuthing in Nebraska does. Click on the "GoogleScout" icon for that listing, and Google will redo the search with the knowledge that it is looking for pages that resemble that one. That feature makes complex searches much easier and faster, without having to put a couple dozen search words in to narrow your results. Still, my favorite part of Google has nothing to do with its search engine. It's the fact that when you go to its home page, you get a clean white page with the corporate logo and a box for entering your search query. That's it. No banner ads, no "extra services" offered, no tiny type that's hard to read. Compare that to the information overload that assaults you when you go to most portal pages to do a search. Eventually, you'll see banner ads on the search results page, Brin says. But he promises that the home page will always retain its clean and crisp style. "The message here is that we do one thing, and we do it better than anyone else," says Brin. True, he's pumping up a company that will make him a lot of money if enough people agree. But I agree: For the moment, Google is the best search site around. Jaffe is a staff writer for Business Week Online
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| |
 | |
 Assistive Technology barker.online Byte of the Apple Eye on Japan Hers.online Inside Wall Street Not-So-Neutral Corner Online Asia Power Lunch Privacy Matters Sector Scope Sound Money Street Wise Washington Watch News Flash Archive | ||||||
