Faster (and Better) than a Speeding Google

The award winning Internet statistics company Hitwise reported on June 19th that 2 out of 3 of you are doing your Internet searches on Google. Yes, Google has captured so much of the Internet’s search traffic that, for all intents and purposes, advertisers don’t care about anyone else. It’s true, online advertisers are throwing 3 of every 4 of their search engine ad dollars Google’s way.

Does Google really do that good a job that they deserve to get the lion’s share of all search engine traffic?

If you ask the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg, perhaps the most respected technology commentator in the country, he’d tell you that Ask.com has better search results than Google – just read, “Ask.com Takes Lead In Designing Display Of Search Results.”

Barry Diller bought Ask.com a couple years back – and has delivered a gem of a search engine with the help of Internet gurus like Gary Price. Still, Ask.com garners less than 4% of all search engine traffic, which makes their recent efforts seem almost quixotic. Despite producing what most experts agree is a better search product, they remain far back in the pack – and the ubiquitous Google just keeps chugging along.

Or, how ‘bout this? Sheryl is fond of saying, “Don’t look in the sock drawer for the ice cream.” Sheryl says lots of things like that – so get used to it.

She is right, however. When it comes to getting concise information quickly there are better alternatives than just doing a perfunctory search on Google.

For instance, suppose you get bitten by little furry spider and you wonder – might it be the dreaded brown recluse spider? Well, you could do a Google search and get 708,000 results – or you could go to Answers.com and get a comprehensive, but mercifully short summary about the brown recluse from the American Heritage Dictionary, the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia and even Wikipedia. Try it yourself – and see if you don’t agree with the folks at Answers.com that “sometimes you just want the answer.”

Want one more example of a site that offers more than Google? Consider the news site Congoo.com. Google will let you search newspapers from around the world for such terms as “fixed annuities,” melissophobia or Belize (I know, you care about nothing else right now because of your upcoming vacation to Belize – do they have bees on Belize?).

What Google won’t do is list the news stories about those terms from pay news sources. For instance, periodicals like The Financial Times, The New Republic and the Wall Street Journal are only available through a paid subscription, so Google won’t list them in its news results.

Congoo.com will not only list them, but it will also allow you to read them for free. It’s true – they offer a limited number of articles from pay sites for free – and it’s not even a quid pro quo. You can elect to subscribe to a pay source – or not, but there is no pressure to do so.

So, next time you need to do a search on the Internet, let the other “yo-yo’s” and yahoos do their perfunctory searches on that “MacDonald’s of Search” called Google. Instead, dine in at the finer establishments that offer a better fare – sites like Ask.com, Answers.com and Congoo.com.

There are a lot more sites, skills and strategies that will make your searches successful. It’s what we teach. Give us a call.

Author’s note: We really do try to stay away from big words and dopey technical definitions in this blog. However, this particular article was written as an entry in an inventive contest sponsored by the Answers.com folks – a site well worth bookmarking for those times when “all you need is the answer.” They are sponsoring a Creative Writing Challenge contest that stipulates the use of certain words. However, that does not abrogate the value of this article in any way. The contest is also well worth studying if you are in business. What an inventive way to get your customers involved. Incidentally, we’ve written before in this blog about Answers.com in “Will Answers.com Replace Google?” No big words in that one!