The Search for a Search Engine

Search engines have come a long way since the mid-1990s.  I recall the time when my 5^th grader was doing research for her Women’s History Month report on author Zora Neal Hurston. When she typed in Hurston’s name in the query field, some of the results were unsavory and downright pornographic. I am not sure why that happened, but it required that my husband and I check the sites before our daughter viewed it.  

Today searching the Web for virtually anything is common place. Users are more skilled on how to search in the Web and search engines have become more specialized and accurate.  According to www.thesearchenginelist.com there are over a thousand search engines of varying specialties, categories and types and over a dozen all-purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Some make it big and others last only a few years before folding. In addition, there are search engines called metasearch engines, such as Dogplie, that use the results of the leading general search engines and return the top results to the user. 

RIP page for Viewzi, a graphic heavy search engine

Any form of information, whether it come in an image, text, video, and audio, on people, events, and things in general can be found on the Web.  Open a browser, navigate to any search engine Web site and type in a person, place, thing, or event and within seconds hundreds if not thousands of returns will pop based on that query.  This can quickly become too much information and some of which is really not good information which is detrimental to its efficacy.   As a result most users will typically not go beyond the first page of results.  From there, they begin to filter through the results and drill down on the information.    

Presently information overload is not the only concern with using search engines, the discourse among Web users is the matter of target marketing and privacy.   Google has been making headlines with its revamping of it user privacy policy.  The mega search engine giant has widened their services to include social networking, online cloud computing with it roll-out of document applications, blogging, medical records repository and much more.  With an awesome amount of services (most are free to individual users), they have become experts at target marketing and data mining as a means to generate revenue.  Ixquick (www.startpage.com) is a metasearch engine that claims to be the world’s most private search engine. They do not capture the user’s IP address and drop cookies to use for target marketing. I think I will begin using them to support their mission to protect user privacy.  

www.ixquick.com or www.startpage.com privacy protected search engine