Tuesday, August 05, 2008

A better search engine than Google?

With all the buzz about Cuil, I feel I've just got to point out the obvious: If you're looking for great search results for popular search terms, be sure to search on Delicious.com as well as use the search function of Stumbleupon. Single keywords in Stumbleupon can produce very different results than Google. Delicious.com, if you didn't know, is a collection of the favorite sites of people who browse the web a lot. Alltop.com is a newer and somewhat similar site, in directory form. And if you have the Stumbleupon toolbar installed, some of your Google search results may be ranked by Stumbleupon rating, which is a big help at times.

Google's search results sometimes have a commercial bias that is rarer on Delicious. Once you get the feel for what you'll find on Delicious, you'll often appreciate the results you get by doing both a Google and a Delicious search, rather than just a Google search alone.

After Ballmer's recent explanation of Microsoft's non-strategy, makes you wonder if part of their reason for going after Yahoo! was to get resources like Delicious, which Yahoo! acquired at the end of 2005!

2 comments:

  1. That's a really good tip. I use Delicious, but I always forget to search there even though it works great for so much of the stuff I search for.

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  2. Thank you very much. I just started using delicious about a week ago. Finally cleaned up my huge link pile. I guess I am still catching up to the new age :-p

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