Life without Google

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 01/06/2005 - 11:03

Can anyone imagine life without Google? More than any other Internet service, with the possible exception of email, the availability of Google has become a kind of icon for the changes the Internet has brought over the past ten years. It's even become a verb.

But Google has not changed much since it's start. And over the past year, I've become frustrated with Google results. Too often, a query returns tens or even hundreds of thousands of results. After the second page, you realize most of them have nothing to do with your query. Many other queries return junk starting on the first page; enter the name and state of virtually any town in the U.S., and what you usually get on the first couple of pages is mostly junk--bargain basement hotel room resellers running link farms so that they show up first.

Google as a company, as far as I can tell, has done only two things: they developed a pretty good search engine about six years ago, and figured out how to make Internet ads work. But on the search engine side, they don't seem to have done much since the company started.

I've looked a a bunch of competitors, and as frustrating as Google is much of the time, it's always been better than most of the alternatives. Until now. You might want to bookmark this site and try it a few times:

www.snap.com

Snap is doing things entirely differently than Google. Snap queries that I've compared with Google results look very promising. Snap, in my limited trials, has typically returned many fewer results that are much more relevant. Snap also offers you easy ways to resort the results according to different criteria, including what other people have been looking at, which can be both interesting and useful.

Snap is the first search engine that I've thought could dethrone Google. And it could happen quickly. Give it a try.

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Sat, 02/13/2010 - 12:38

Can anyone imagine life without Google? More than any other Internet service, with the possible exception of email, the availability of Google has become a kind of icon for the changes the Internet has brought over the past ten years. It's even become a verb. But Google has not changed much since it's start. And over the past year, I've become frustrated with Google results. Too often, a query returns tens or even hundreds of thousands of results. After the second page, you realize most of them have nothing to do with your query. Many other queries return junk starting on the first page; enter the name and state of virtually any town in the U.S., and what you usually get on the first couple of pages is mostly junk--bargain basement hotel room resellers running link farms so that they show up first. Google as a company, as far as I can tell, has done only two things: they developed a pretty good search engine about six years ago, and figured out how to make Internet ads work. But on the search engine side, they don't seem to have done much since the company started. I've looked a a bunch of competitors, and as frustrating as Google is much of the time, it's always been better than most of the alternatives. Until now. You might want to bookmark this site and try it a few times: www.snap.com Snap is doing things entirely differently than Google. Snap queries that I've compared with Google results look very promising. Snap, in my limited trials, has typically returned many fewer results that are much more relevant. Snap also offers you easy ways to resort the results according to different criteria, including what other people have been looking at, which can be both interesting and useful. Snap is the first search engine that I've thought could dethrone Google. And it could happen quickly. Give it a try.