New Search Engines
The other day I received an email from an upstart search engine. It went like this:

Hello,

We would like to add your website huguesjohnson.com to our search engine/web directory

In order to add a description and select the keywords your site is relevant on please fill and submit this form: [url]

.. And if you like our website please reciprocate with a link from your site, like this:

[link]

Thank you.

My first reaction was: Google didn’t find my site and then send an email asking me to index it for them. Their magical GoogleBot took care of all that. It seems these guys have the “find site” and “scrape email address” parts down but not the rest. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen an email like this and it won’t be the last.

I paid a quick visit to the site and it’s a search engine with web sites organized into categories. I guess it would be an okay idea if Yahoo and dmoz.org didn’t already exist. If this site is intended to make money it won’t. It doesn’t offer any advantage over the plethora of other search sites. If it’s a hobby site (like this one) then I suppose it will serve its purpose.

Google is obviously the dominant force in the internet search market. I can’ think of the last time I, or anyone I know, did an internet search with a different engine. Well, I tried that new Microsoft Live and was unimpressed. The results weren’t as good as Google and the XP/Vista theme was annoying. I have a Master’s degree in computer science; I don’t need big fuzzy buttons to figure out what to do.

Someone will unseat Google eventually. They’ll do it in one of two ways: 1) offer drastically better search results 2) offer some new feature that users can’t live without. What’s this new feature? If I knew I’d be working on it right now. I know what won’t work though: 1) creating a search site that’s nearly identical to ones currently getting their tails kicked 2) creating a script-heavy, colorful, slow-loading site that returns poor results.


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