Shaking the Google Addiction

I’ve been such a total Google junkie since it kicked all of the search engine’s collective asses. Nothing else has come close, so I haven’t even bothered looking anywhere else for perhaps a couple of years now. It just hit me that I’m a little uncomfortable with that total reliance on one source (and their algorithms) for my searching.

So, following Mark Evans’ lead, I’m going to try going a week without Google. I’m not approaching this from a “Google is EVIL” angle – I think they’re the exact opposite – they’ve had opportunity to be evil, and have shown that they want to make the effort to be Good. I just need to take a look around to see what else is coming along…

First, I’m going to try Ice Rocket – kinda Google-like, but it’s been doing some cool stuff with RSS and blogs long before The Goog rolled that stuff out.

I think I should poke around and see if the Meta Search Aggregators are progressing. Remember Dog Pile? They were teh cool before Google ruled us all. (heh – just checked and it’s still running! I’ll have to check it out…)

Update: Woah. Just did a quick (Dogpile) search for “metasearch”, and came up with a bunch of candidates:

I haven’t done any research into legitimacy of any of these tools yet, and haven’t tried them out (except for Dog Pile), but there’s the (short, incomplete) list.

Update: Just did a search for “Calgary” on each of these metasearchers, and only 2 engines returned stuff that wasn’t mostly ads, or just piping in Google’s results. Dog Pile and Search AllInOne – of the two, Dog Pile was more useful.

I’ve been such a total Google junkie since it kicked all of the search engine’s collective asses. Nothing else has come close, so I haven’t even bothered looking anywhere else for perhaps a couple of years now. It just hit me that I’m a little uncomfortable with that total reliance on one source (and their algorithms) for my searching.

So, following Mark Evans’ lead, I’m going to try going a week without Google. I’m not approaching this from a “Google is EVIL” angle – I think they’re the exact opposite – they’ve had opportunity to be evil, and have shown that they want to make the effort to be Good. I just need to take a look around to see what else is coming along…

First, I’m going to try Ice Rocket – kinda Google-like, but it’s been doing some cool stuff with RSS and blogs long before The Goog rolled that stuff out.

I think I should poke around and see if the Meta Search Aggregators are progressing. Remember Dog Pile? They were teh cool before Google ruled us all. (heh – just checked and it’s still running! I’ll have to check it out…)

Update: Woah. Just did a quick (Dogpile) search for “metasearch”, and came up with a bunch of candidates:

I haven’t done any research into legitimacy of any of these tools yet, and haven’t tried them out (except for Dog Pile), but there’s the (short, incomplete) list.

Update: Just did a search for “Calgary” on each of these metasearchers, and only 2 engines returned stuff that wasn’t mostly ads, or just piping in Google’s results. Dog Pile and Search AllInOne – of the two, Dog Pile was more useful.

3 thoughts on “Shaking the Google Addiction”

  3. If you are using firefox you should try the customize google greese monkey script, adds links for other search engines directy to google SERP’s among other things. You’ll never use google the same way again http://www.customizegoogle.com/

    My other fav lately has been Rollyo.com lets create your own site specific searches, i’m using to do searches across 10 or so large community sites to find specific documentation with out all the extra stuff.

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