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Winter 2014

Internet Reviews: Alternatives to GoogleJennifer A. BartlettUniversity of Kentucky, jen.bartlett@uky.edu

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Repository CitationBartlett, Jennifer A., "Internet Reviews: Alternatives to Google" (2014). Library Faculty and Staff Publications. 247.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/libraries_facpub/247

Internet Reviews: Alternatives to Google

Notes/Citation InformationPublished in Kentucky Libraries, v. 78, no. 1, p. 10-13.

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This review is available at UKnowledge: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/libraries_facpub/247

D E P A R T M E N T K E N T U C K Y L I B R A R Y A S S O C I A T I O N

INTERNET REVIEWS: ALTERNATIVES TO GOOGLEBY JENNIFER A. BARTLETTHEAD OF W . T YOUNG LIBRARY REFERENCE SERVICES

UNIVERSITÍ OF KENTUCKY LIBRARIES

lev'uick, what is the world's largest searchengine? Most people would immediately, andcorrectly, answer "Google." As of 2012,Google dominated the traditional web searchmarket with nearly 67% market share, fol-lowed by Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo!.' But islarger necessarily better? Although both librar-ians and our library patrons often "google" ourweb searches, other competing sites, old andnew, may indeed be viable options to usealongside, or even to replace, the "Big Tbree."

METASEARCHING

Rather than maintain vast lists of web pages,as major search engines such as Google do,metasearch engines create their own virtualdatabase of sources and then send searchterms to several search engine platforms atonce, returning a compiled list of results oftenorganized by type or theme. One of the firstmetasearch engines, Mamma.com(http://mamma.com), was created in 1996 andcalled itself "the mother of all search engines"because of the perceived comprehensive natureof this model of searching and aggregation.Most metasearch engines offer advanced searchfeatures such as Boolean operators, phrasesearching, wildcards and field searching.

ddgpile'Dogpilehttp://www.dogpile.com/Dogpile, created in 2006,

searches engines and directories includingGoogle, Yahoo!, and Yandex. Users canchoose to search web pages, images, video,news, local sources, and white pages. Helpfulfeatures include a list of related alternatesearches on the results screen, as well as a listof a user's most recent 15 searches. Theadvanced search will allow users to search byexact word phrases, language, and domain,and Preferences offers options for adult filters,as well as how local results are displayed.Dogpile presents useful, relevant results in an

attractive, user-friendly interface. The caninetheme is evident throughout: you can "gofetch" on the toolbar, and "Favorite Fetches"are trending searches listed on the first screen.

^metacrawlerMetacrawler/Zoohttp://www.metacrawler.com/http://www.zoo.comMetacrawler has long been apopular metasearch option,

featuring results from Google, Yahoo! andYandex. Developed in 1994 at the Universityof Washington, Metacrawler was acquired in2000 by Infospace, Inc., and will be renamed"Zoo.com" in early 2014- Zoo.com aims toattract more users to its simple, graphically-intensive home page with local weather, topicsearches, and prominent links to Twitter,Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr. Zoo.comsearcbes Google, Yahoo!, and Truveo (forvideos).

ixquick

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Ixquickhttps://ixquick.comIxquick, launched in 1998, is

more well-known in Europe than the UnitedStates, and bills itself as "the world's most pri-vate search engine." Users can search in 17languages (including Norwegian, Finnish,Turkish, Chinese and Polish), and each lan-guage version includes local search engines.Searches return the top ten results from globaland relevant local search engines, but do notuse Google results. Ixquick's "star system"ranks results by awarding a star for each topten result returned by a specific search engine;those results with the most stars will be listedfirst. It also offers an international phonedirectory for businesses, individuals andreverse number searching. A particularlyinteresting feature, especially from a privacystandpoint, is the ability to access a webpagefrom the results page using the Ixquick proxy,which will open the page anonymously with

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no IP address or other user information. TheIxQuick Highlighter, another results pageoption, emphasizes the search terms on thewebpage.

yîrr/Yippyhttp://yippy.comYippy (formerly known as

Clusty) is a metasearch engine that collectsresults from Ask, Gigahlast, Open Directoryand others. Similar results in Yippy arearranged into topics, called "clouds." As withan increasing number of search engines, Yippyadvertises itself as a private search engine thatdoes not track user activity and history on itswebsite. In addition, it aims to be a "one-stop-shop" for users, offering weh-based e-mail,document storage, calendars, a contact list,video conferencing, and an array of widgets.Self-described as a "family-friendly" platform,Yippy removes results dealing with pornogra-phy, sexual products, gambling, and sites inap-propriate for children (see the site's censorshipFAQ for more details).

PRIVACY

A hot topic in the news recently has beenonline security and privacy, which has directapplicability to major search engines. Google,Bing and Yahoo! have one thing in common:tracking search histories and using that datato tailor results to searchers' interests. Whiletracking might improve the search experiencefor end users, it also may he perceived as aninvasion of online privacy.' Several altematesearch engines are geared toward protectinguser anonymity, while claiming to provideequally comprehensive results.

Duck Duck Gohttps://duckduckgo.com/Founded in 2008, Duck DuckGo says it protects user priva-cy and avoids the "filter huh-

ble," a situation in which search algorithmspredict what information users would mostlike to see based on previous searches andthus isolates them in their own informationecho chamber.' Fxamples of common filterhubbies include Facehook's advertisementsand news stream, Amazon's purchase recom-mendations and Google's personalized searchresults. DDG purports to avoid this issue bynot tracking search queries or IP address. Inaddition to using results collated from its ownwehcrawler, DDG also runs searches againstBing, Yahoo, crowd-sourced sites such asWikipedia, and over 30 other search engines.

Using triggers such as "news" and "map" tosearches will narrow results to specific types ofcontent, and DDG's "Ihang" syntax searchesover 1,000 other search engines directly. Forexample, typing "lahehooks siddhartha" willsearch the Ahebooks.com website for all titlesincluding the word "siddhartha." Directlyechoing Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" searchoption, the "I'm Feeling Ducky" option allowsusers to bring up only the first search result(and hopefully most relevant) search resultsby including a back slash ( \ ) before thesearch term. Also interesting is the goodiespages, which lists specialized search queries incategories including Geography, Travel, Triviaand Fntertainment. DDG falls short hy notyet providing image searching, although it canhe accomplished hy adding manually adding"!i" to any search. Additional options areavailable in the drop-down menu next to thesearch box.

StartStartpagehttps://startpage.com/Another site claiming to pro-tect user privacy is Ixquick's

Startpage, which hills itself as "the world'smost private search engine." Unlike DuckDuck Go, Startpage gets its search results fromGoogle, but first removes all identifying infor-mation from the query. It records no informa-tion ahout its users, including search logs andIP addresses. Further, Startpage offers anoptional proxy server service that allows usersto connect to websites outside Startpage with-out passing along personal data such as cookieinformation and IP addresses. Startpage,launched relatively recently in 2009 in theUnited States, is hased on the previously men-tioned Ixquick search engine (https://www.ixquick.com/). Both sites use the same search-ing and privacy features.

USER INVOLVEMENTWhy do you see what you do in a list of websearch results? Search engine algorithms takeinto account many of the factors that we aslibrarians observe, alheit in a mechanized way:relevance of keywords, authority, trust level,domain, location and so on (including adver-tising, in some cases).'' These signals combineto present the user, ideally, with the most rele-vant results depending on the types of materi-als requested. Search Engine Optimization, orSEO, involves finding ways to make wehsiteappear higher in search results, thus attractingmore traffic, and is of major concern to mar-keting professionals.' Another factor that new

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search engines are incorporating, however, isuser opinion, delivered either passivelythrough searching behavior or actively bymeans of comments and scoring; examples of"crowdsourced" information platforms includeElickr, Waze, Google Maps, and YouTube.

blekko Blekkohttp://blekko.com/

Launched in 2010, Blekko is a human-curatedsearch engine that searches 3 billion selected"trusted websites." Rather than troll the webfor everything, Blekko concentrates on sitesits search algorithms and human curators con-sider to be the most reputable, which ideallycuts down on irrelevant results. The initialsearch page offers a selection of trending top-ics in addition to a simple, Google-like searchbox, which includes an easy option for search-ing photos and videos. Search results are pre-sented in pre-defined categories based onsearch terms, for example, "Top Results," ,"News," "Shopping," and so on. In addition tobuilt-in categories, Blekko relies on the con-cept of "slashtags" to further define searchresults. There are hundreds of pre-existing,human-created topical slashtags, or users canformulate their own slashtags and build a col-lection of favorite websites by creating aBlekko account. The slashtags are then addedto the list and can then be used by othersearchers. Eor example, the search "garbagedisposal" will retrieve results split into sevendiscrete categories: "Quick Answer" (adescription of garbage disposals fromWikipedia), "Top Results," "Shopping," "DIY,""Appliances," "Magazines," and "Latest." Thesearch "garbage disposal /diy" will retrieveonly pages related to garbage disposal installa-tion and repair. Blekko's interface is heavilygraphics-intensive, and the mobile version inparticular, named "izik," has been designedspecifically for the layout and gesture controlsof iPad and Android tablets.

blippex^ Blippexhttps://www.blippex.org/

Another site priding itself on its protectionsof user privacy is Blippex, the next iteration ofthe Archify search engine, which was discon-tinued in mid-2013. Blippex's search algo-rithm ranks search results based on how longusers stay on a website, or its "DwellRank." Inorder to gauge user engagement, Blippexrequires users to install a browser plugin,which tracks the page URL, current time, andthe amount of time spent at a particular page.No doubt realizing that this requirement

might be a hard sell, Blippex emphasizes thatthere is no registration process, and that userprivacy is a major emphasis. In addition,Blippex is remarkably open about its data,providing a monthly database dump of theBlippex search index, in addition to a varietyof interesting search statistics.

SPECIALIZED AND DEEPWEB SEARCH ENGINESName any subject, and there will probably bedozens of niche search engines devoted to it.Eurther, some search engines specialize in spe-cific types of materials such as blog posts,images, games, and so on. Three well-knownand comprehensive directories of specializedsearch engines may be found at Best of theWeb (http://botw.org/), the dmoz OpenDirectory Project (http://www.dm02.org/) andthe Yahoo! Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/).

These directories will often include sites notindexed through major search engines such asGoogle, which indexes primarily the "visibleweb." The "deep" or "invisible" web includesdynamic searchable databases which require alogin procedure or the entry of keywords in asearch box, websites behind corporate fire-walls, unlinked sites, and other pages deliber-ately blocked from search crawlers by theirauthors. One example of a specialized "deepweb" search tool that gets around some ofthese barriers is Pipi (https://pipl.com), whichis designed to find information about individ-uals using sources such as public records,member directories, and social profiles nottypically retrieved using traditional searchengines. Other deep web search engines anddirectories include lnfomine(http://infomine.ucr.edu/) and CompletePlanet (http://aip.completeplanet.com).

Einally, this hybrid search engine is an inter-esting example of a human-curated, special-ized search tool:

Wolfram/Alphahttp://www.wolframalpha.com

Not a search engine per se. Wolfram Alpha is a"computational knowledge engine" thatanswers factual questions using a system ofalgorithms and human-curated data ftom out-side sources, rather than presenting the userwith a list of possibly relevant websites. Eorexample, the query "life expectancy" in Googlewill present the user with a Wikipedia articleand data chart, a life expectancy calculator,and statistics from the Centers for Disease

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Control and Prevention. Wolfram Alpha willextract relevant data from its library of sourcesand present it on the results pages: the mean,median, highest and lowest lifespan worldwide,a life expectancy world map, mean lifeexpectancy history and distribution, countryrankings, and so on. In addition to mathemat-ics and statistics questions (a particularstrength of the service). Wolfram Alpha's cate-gories also include money and finance, socioe-conomic data, geography, food and nutrition,life sciences, sports and games, and more. APro subscription allows manipulation anddownloading of information and images.

Web search platforms change almost daily andyour favorite site may change its ownership,interface and features in the blink of an eye.To keep up with the latest news in web searchengines, try Search Engine ]oumal (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/) and Search EngineLand (http://searchengineland.com/).

Happy searching!

Jennifer Bartlettien.bartlett@uky.edu

WORKS CITED' "In Search, Coogle Still Leads." New York Times.com. New York Times, 3 April 2013. Web. 15

Dec. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/03/business/In-Search-Google-Still-Leads.html?smid=pl-share>. Internationally, however, other search engines are growing indominance. Yandex (http://www.yandex.com/) is Russia's most popular search engine, with60% of all search traffic in Russia. China's Baidu search engine (http://www.baidu.com) is alsoavailable worldwide and maintains over 64% market share in that country. For a comprehen-sive list of search engines organized by location, try Search Engine Colossus athttp://www.searchenginecolossus.com/.

^ Magid. Larry. "Protecting Your Privacy from Corporations, the Govemment, And You.". Forbes.com. Dec. 31, 2013. Web. 4 Jan. 2014. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrv-

magid/2013/12/31/protecting-vour-privacy-from-corporations-the-government-and-you/>

' Green, Holly. "Breaking Out of Your Intemet Filter Bubble." Forbes.com. 29 Aug. 2011. Web.22 Dec. 2013. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2011/08/29/breaking-out-of-your-internet-filter-bubble/>

•• Harry, David. "How Search Engines Rank Web Pages." Search Engine Watch. 23 Sept. 2013.Web. 2 Jan. 2014. <http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2064539/How-Search-Engines-Rank-Web-Pages>

' Male, Bianca. "10 Basic SEO Tips To Get You Started." Business Insider. 13 Jan. 2010. Web. 23Dec. 2013. <http://www.businessinsider.com/10-basic-seo-tips-evervone-should-know-2010-l>

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