Jim Karpen Tips

August 2001

New resources for searching the Internet just keep popping up. Which is good, because as this leviathan continues to grow, we need ever more ways to get at it.

Upstart Google took everyone by surprise when it came along because no one thought that it could unseat the established search engines. Surveys now show that Google is by far the most popular.

Google now has two upstart competitors, Wisenut and Teoma. Like Google, they share an important feature: they don't let companies pay for placement. You may not have realized that those items at the top of the results on some other search engines are there because someone paid for that position. Google, Wisenut, and Teoma hold fast to the notion that what appears up top are the resources that are the best.

Google's basic approach is to put the results first that have the largest number of important links to them because these are the sites that people find most useful. This emphasis on popularity has worked well. Google also appealed because of its stripped-down speed and clean design. And it has tried hard to index the most web pages.

The two newcomers have copied Google's speed and clean design. Of the two, I was most impressed with Wisenut (despite the odd name). I always test an engine by searching on my name. Wisenut did a fine job of finding and categorizing the main areas where my work appears on the Internet. It was superior to Teoma in that regard and compares somewhat favorably with Google.

Wisenut, which officially launches in September, claims to have one of the fastest methods for indexing the web and that its database is among the largest. The company also claims their search engine goes beyond providing people with the most popular pages on the Web. When you enter keywords, the search engine analyzes the words to determine whether the most popular sites are relevant for that search. Their philosophy is that the most popular sites may not be the most important.

Teoma, which is still in its growing phase and has a database just one-sixth the size of Google's, takes a different approach. When their search engine indexes the web, it looks at subject-specific topics. Their goal is to cluster the Web into "communities" and identify the most important pages and experts in those communities. This suggests that my test wasn't fair to Teoma and that it would do better with a more general topic.

In addition to these new search engines, you might want to take a look at SurfWax. This is an excellent meta-search engine that searches many search engines at once. I'm quite impressed with it.

© 2001 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D. (#281)