February 7, 2005
The World's Biggest, But is it Useful
The folks at Web's Biggest say that they are "The World's Biggest Directory Search Engine." Last week Internetweek reported that:
A Web search engine that uses the "whois" database said Friday that it searches more Web sites than any other search engine, including Google, which crawls the Web in a different manner for its search results. ....Always on the outlook for better information sources I headed right over and entered a search that has pointed a few visitors to Modulator: live strong bands. The results were 3 references that appeared to be paid adds and they were preceded by this message:
"Other search engines missed from a third to more than half of the Web sites [included] in the Web's Biggest search results," the firm stated.
Important: We suggest you make your search LESS specific. Please remember you are not searching the contents of web pages like you do at Google or Yahoo. You are searching one paragraph website descriptions. Furthermore, you will only find websites that contain EACH of your keywords in their description. Web's Biggest is designed to find websites devoted to what you are looking for, not web pages that happen to contain those words.On the other hand a search for Lance Armstrong generated quite a few results.
Want to find the text of the state of the union speech? Well, it is #2 on Google and the Web's Biggest responds with the above "be less specific" message and no links of any kind. And it was a bit slow doing that.
Lesson: use your preferred traditional search service first. In fact, I'm still puzzling over why I'd use them at all...
Comments
I searched "The Modulator," and you're not there...and the results I do get are squished in the middle between three other columns and rows of ads. Very user-unfriendly.
Posted by Ogre at February 7, 2005 12:15 PMI discovered the same thing but wasn't surprised. I don't think they pay much, if any, attention to a site's title.
Posted by Steve at February 7, 2005 2:08 PM
