The topic of search engines (and the information and concepts they represent) is sort of why I started this blog in the first place, and I’ve been getting more interested. I remember I used to use dogpile long ago, when search engines were young and sucky. But then I found that Google produced results that were simply better in every possible way from the other engines (i.e., AltaVista, Yahoo!, and HotBot at the time).
But it’s no longer the case that Google produces the only good results. In fact, for some reason Google still hasn’t indexed this blog after about 2 months, but MSN has it indexed through last week. The other two main, unique search engines also turn up a few links not found on the others, mainly obscure forums, when I query “ragesoss.” One reason Google probably hasn’t indexed me is that no one links to me. I thought people would link to me through trackbacks and the like, but I found out they aren’t (natively) supported for Blogger. I’m trying to remedy that.
Amazingly, for results for the same query from Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, 84.9% of the results (from the first page) are unique to only one of the searches, meaning all four differ significantly from the others and may be valuable in certain situations: check it out.
I really am turning into a nerd. I mean, I am who I am, more or less who I’ve always been, but I’m awful young to be as eclectic as I’m becoming.