InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
July 7, 1999
What's The Best Search Engine For Business?| Threads |
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There are a ton of search engines out there, but what's the best one for business? Which ones have you found useful for serious research, and why? Which services let you cut through the clutter? Which ones give you results broad enough to be useful, but not so broad as to leave you drowning in data? Conversely, which ones are the dogs that return old data, dead links, or simply have too much noise and too little signal? Discuss it in LangaLetter threads. |
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| Fred Langa is a senior consulting editor and columnist for Windows Magazine. Fred's free weekly newsletter is available via subscribe@langa.com. You can contact him at fred@langa.com or via his website at http://www.langa.com. |
Search engines are sure in the news lately--every portal is trying to tout its engine as the best and is striving to back up the claim through mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, and technology improvements. But what's best for home surfers isn't necessarily best for business users; search engines are definitely a place where one size does not fit all.
Despite the fact that there are literally hundreds of engines out there, the quality of their search results varies enormously. In fact, search engines might seem like a commodity, but they're definitely, absolutely, positively not.
Let me give you one quick example: Go to Yahoo, type in "CMP Media" and you'll get exactly one hit--the CMP Media home page. OK, that's useful, but not very.
Try the same search at Lycos, and you also get exactly one link: But it's ridiculous--it's a sub-page on something called the "Wall Street Directory" that's reviewing CMP's "TechInvestor" service, with no mention of anything else.
LookSmart's "most-visited" option gives essentially the same results for "CMP Media" as does Lycos, pointing just to TechInvestor. LookSmart's more general search is even more useless: It points to "World - Entertainment - Music - Genres - Other Genres - New Age - Artists A-L - Enya - Photos & Multimedia." Now, I'm no longer a CMP employee, but I'm pretty sure CMP has nothing whatsoever to do with photos of pop musician Enya.
Excite? A search for "CMP Media" gives a single listing there: A career page about "CMP's guide to computer industry events." Yawn.
In the past, I've shunned Ask Jeeves for serious research because it always tended to oversimplify my requests into uselessly vague areas. To me, using Jeeves' natural-language parser seemed like talking to a very limited grade-school kid. But asking Jeeves for "CMP Media" brings up at least some useful information: Three links for stock advice and information about CMP, a link to CMP's home page, and a link to TechShopper's hardware reviews.
Google was more promising: It returns a few hundred hits, but the rank-ordering is very funky: The top item is a press release, for example, not a home page.
Netscape's vaunted "New Search" feature serves up 10 hits, but the top one is a 2-year-old press release. How about the bottom one? Well, (drum roll, please) it's another 2-year-old press release. And all the Netscape results are, in fact, pulled from just two places: CNET and Wired. That's probably because Netscape's new proprietary search is a Yahoo-like list of sites reviewed by some 13,000 volunteer editors. That's fine for the reviewed sites, but of the 300 million or so Web pages out there, they've only gotten to 675,000. Plus, as this example shows, even the reviewed sites may not be at all up to date. What good is that for really serious searching? (For related stories on Netscape's new search options, see http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990624S0008 andhttp://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990625S0001.)
AltaVista got itself lost in the search-engine shuffles during the last year or so and is in the midst of a takeover by online venture firm CMGI Inc. Along the way, it's fallen to 10th place in search-engine popularity. But I've always found it to be excellent for serious research, and this simple example shows why: It returns a ton of information on "CMP Media," including links to CMP's home page, all its subsidiaries and divisions, press releases, and so on. In fact, the plethora of detailed information is one reason John Q. Public might avoid AltaVista, but for serious searching, it's a real plus. I find myself trying other search engines, but always coming back to AltaVista.
There are many, many other engines out there: Which ones have you found useful for serious research, and why? Which services let you cut through the clutter? Which ones give you results broad enough to be useful, but not so broad as to leave you drowning in data? Conversely, which ones are the dogs that return old data, dead links, or simply have too much noise and too little signal? Let's pool our knowledge: Join in the discussion in the threaded-chat area!
