Web search enginesThis page was added to my site because I decided that it was foolish to place too much trust in Google Search. I have done so in the past, many people do. It has long been in the back of my mind that we all are too reliant on one search engine and that there is a danger in that.I became particularly disenchanted with Google following April 2021 when I had to change the URL of my website (I changed it from ramblingsdc.net to comagecontra.net)
The search engines listed in the first two lines in the table below were from Search Engine Journal. The third line in the table lists three more search engines that I read of in The Conversation. As of August 2024 I am inclined to think that Google is more interested in pursuing profit than in providing a service. My impression is that Yandex is the best available search engine at this time. Contact: David K. Clarke – © |
Internet search engines, in alphabetical order
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Later additions, from SEJ, better than Google:
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The search engines on the above row were listed in SEJ, Search Engine Journal | |||
From The Conversation
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Baidu; a Chinese propaganda search engine
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Ecosia; better than Google
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Other search engines
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Special Google searches
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As of August 2024 the more I looked into the matter the more it seemed to me that if our aim is to find what is out there, rather than simply what is the most often accessed, there are much better search engines than Google that are available to us.
If Google is failing to find the sites I've tested it on, how many more is it also failing to find? It is a difficult question to answer. |
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Tests
If most of the search engines, other than Yandex, are failing to find my pages, what else are they failing to find?
Not just my devices
Wondering whether Yandex was giving my site a higher ranking because I was searching from my devices I did a few trial searches, anonymously, on computers at local libraries. I got the same results.
A serious failureGoogle lists a web site that is full of lies, but not another web page that details that lack of credibility.
"Stop These Things (STT) is an anti-wind website promoting anecdotes and pseudoscience intended to cast doubt on the effectiveness of wind energy. The website also promotes claims alleging people living in close proximity to wind turbines suffer assorted detrimental health conditions. I wrote a page going into detail about the insulting, misleading and dishonest nature of Stop These Things back in 2013. (The URL of my page is https://comagecontra.net/Australia/stopthesethings.html, it is titled 'Some facts about Stop These Things'.) Running a test of Google search in 2022/08/27 showed that my page was not just given a low ranking, it was not on Google's list at all. Yet it did get a high ranking on Bing, Duckduckgo, Ecosia, OneSearch, Swisscows, Yahoo and Yandex. My page on the dishonesty of Stop These Things was previously given a high ranking on a Google search, when it was under my old ramblingsdc.net URL, but following the change of my website to comagecontra.net in April 2021 Google seems to have ignored it.
Background to this pageAbout March 2021 Yahoo Small Business stopped supporting web hosting. They had hosted my web pages, ramblingsdc.net, for about 15 years.
Google search had previously given many of my pages under ramblingsdc.net a high rating. I expected similar ratings within a few weeks for my new pages, but after almost a year Google had still not picked up on the change. Yandex has picked up on my new site, and Yahoo search has picked up on it to a limited extent, Google Search has almost entirely failed.
Google page rankingBarry Jones, in his book What is to be Done?, in the chapter on How the Digital World Changed Everything wrote about how Google's ranks web pages:"PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites... A PageRank results from a mathematical algorithm based on the webgraph, created by all World Wide Web pages as nodes and hyperlinks as edges."
Of course the ranking of pages can't be done properly without first indexing the great majority of the pages on the Internet and it seems to me at the time of writing that Google Search had not indexed many of my pages at all, well over a year after I had set them up under a new home URL, comagecontra.net.
If this is how Google's ranking is done it would result in 'catch 22' type of problem. A site is not going to get many links until it becomes well known, and if Google doesn't list it at all few people will find it and link to it.
Honesty ranking?Pages referenced by a search engine could have their ranking adjusted according to their truthfulness. At present highly dishonest pages get just as high, or higher, a ranking in search engines such as Google as reliable, honest sites.In these days of effective machine learning and artificial intelligence surely it would be quite possible to have search engines assess the truthfulness of the pages indexed. Those that contain many fallacies could be given a low ranking, perhaps even not indexed at all? |
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Related pagesRelated pages on external sites...The Conversation, Suzannah Wood and Nicolas Suzor, 2014/04/09, Baidu’s perfect paradox: free speech and the right to censor; "China’s biggest search engine has a constitutional right to filter its search results, a US court found,,," "...search engines are not exactly like newspapers. While we expect and learn to accept the editorial bias of our newspapers, the bias of search engines can be much harder to detect. It can be hard to know what information is being left out when you don’t know what you’re missing."More from The Conversation: Is Google getting worse? Increased advertising and algorithm changes may make it harder to find what you’re looking for; by Mohiuddin Ahmed and Paul Haskell-Dowland, 2021/09/01
Source Watch by the Center for Media and Democracy evaluates sources on the Internet. This particular article is about a very dishonest anti-wind-power site called Stop These Things. I have written a page on STT.
Related pages on this site...Reliable information: Where should you look for reliable information?Information sources: My sources of information |
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