KEY POINTS:
Could you get by on the web without the Google search engine, or for that matter, those of Yahoo, MSN/Live, Ask or AOL?
That was the exercise the website Altsearchengines.com asked its readers to participate in on Tuesday (US time).
For a full day, you were not to use one of the big five search engines, no Googling, no popping into Yahoo Search for a quick query.
I gave it a go yesterday and not having much faith in the alternative search engines, I chose one that was getting good reviews around the web - Quintura.com.
According to Altsearchengines.com, Quintura is based in Moscow and headed by Yakov Sadchikov.
It's point of difference is that it displays the results of your search query as a sort of cloud of words as well as a straight list. For instance, by punching the word "religion" into Quintura, your cloud will include a Wikipedia article on religion, quotations about religion and some of the major religious news websites.
It's a good idea, because it gives you a good overview very quickly of the main sources of information about religion that exist on the web.
The cloud is structured to have higher ranking hits at its middle and by clicking on words in the cloud you can hone your search. You can also search for images and videos and search Amazon from within Quintura.
I duly referred to Quintura all day on Tuesday and I got by okay. But I missed the precisiveness of Google and the function of Google that allows you torestrict your searches to indexed pages from New Zealand.
Quintura is good, but you just can't beat the simplicity of Google and the quality of the results it delivers up. Richard MacManus, the Wellington-based editor of Readitwrite.com used Hakia.com for the day. He hasn't posted his results yet.
Hakia's "basic promise" is to "bring search results by meaning match - similar to the human brain's cognitive skills - rather than by the mere occurrence (or popularity) of search terms. Hakia's new technology is a radical departure from the conventional indexing approach, because indexing has severe limitations to handle full-scale semantic search."
Did anyone else ditch the top five for the day? Any good suggestions for more niche search engines that deliver good results? Could you cope on the web without the top five search engines?
