The Lair

So, a couple of days ago - I decided that I would try out the day without Google. Well, the challenge was specifically a day without the 5 major search engines, but in my case - that means el Goog.

I don’t have any toolbars or home page settings to Google, in fact - I only use Google in one very simple, specific way. I have a Smart Bookmark which allows me to type something like this …

google alternate search engines

on my Firefox address bar - yielding the Google SERP for alternative search engines.

Clearly, I knew that muscle memory would win out if I left the smart bookmark unchanged, so at the start of the day - I edited the Google bookmark to search Clusty instead. To make the test complete; I also disabled my smartmark searches for Google Images, Google News and Google Groups. I also wired in additional smartmarks for Alltheweb and Hakia. I would have also loved to use Powerset, but alas - they don’t have a public search offering just yet.

The thing is - I actually don’t need to use Google that often. This discovery surprised me greatly. For the work I was doing that day, I needed a PHP function reference; a bit of LaTex help and some poking around Wikipedia and a couple of forums. Only one of those things requires the help of a general purpose search engine (the LaTex stuff). PHP has a convenient search built into their site (which works), Wikipedia has its own smartmark on my browser so I don’t need a search engine for it and the forums on specialized topics also have their own search built-in.

That’s my normal day to day work. Where I really do need a search engine is for things out of the ordinary - like, for example, writing a blog entry. I wrote the Safari post on the day without Goog and finding the online references without a decent search engine was a traumatic experience.

The first search was very simple and straightforward - I searched for “Konqueror” to find an authoritative link to the Qt based browser. Clusty decided that the first (most relevant) link was to the Wikipedia entry. Hakia and AllTheWeb linked directly to konqueror.org (a better result by far). Incidentally, Google linked directly to Konqueror.org as well. Clusty had the .org result as second most relevant.

Esoterica? That’s where the alternatives fell on their faces a bit.

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised by Hakia’s performance. I actually do research in the same areas (semantic relevance between words and phrases is essentially the subject of my thesis) and I have a fair handle on what’s possible. Hakia was a real world NL based search engine that worked and I was quite pleased at how far things have progressed in the field. There were more interesting snippets which emerged from my search for alternatives though. I had no idea that WebFountain (one of my research interests a few years ago) had fallen out of favour quite so fast, for one thing.

Which brings me to current events and news… Finding news was really really hard without resorting to Google News or its major competitors. I went to Reuters but they have piss poor search. I then resorted (in near desperation) to visiting a few of the more “reputable” news organization websites individually. Hardly an ideal means of finding more information but it worked.

In summary? I could probably manage without Google Search. The other results are “good enough” to cope. Are they a complete drop-in replacement though? I’d suggest that’s still a way off. It actually seemed like a long day, but I think that was due to the unfamiliarity with some of the interfaces and visual cues as much as anything else. If I had to, I could learn to live without el Goog. But make no mistake, it would (given the current state of affairs in search engineland) be a definite trade down. It would really take a strong ideological reason to convince me to trade in Google’s superior relevance in search results for another search engine. But can it be done? I think the day without Google showed me that it is indeed possible.