The world wide web, to whom Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist at the European centre of particle physics gave the name to in 1989, is an ever increasing organism whose only structural element is the domain name system (DNS). This gigantic body achieves its accessibility and transparency only through search engines. Many of us have little awareness of the fact that Google, the search engine of choice by many of us, is only indexing an estimated 30-50 billion websites while the total web assumably contains more than a trillion sites. A tremendous amount of knowledge, data, information, spam, one may choose the term preferred, remains undetected within the meshes of the so-called Deep Web.
When in May 1993 Matthew Gray, a student from MIT made the first index he found only 100 sites. In 1996 the search engine Altavista which is already history today counted hundreds of thousands of websites and millions of documents. An unbelievable development that inspires many a creative minds to invent new methods of data structuring and content evaluation by more and more sophisticated algorithms.
It is therefore not amazing that various companies try to find to their opinion more optimal solutions than the existing dominating search engines (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) to make data available and turn them into knowledge. Some present data in a visually more attractive way for users, they cluster documents according to topics, others give us the possibility to compare the results of our searches of the big search engines, and we then choose the best for our purposes.
It is all about re-organizing knowledge, presenting data, and compiling them in a content-oriented mode. And it is all about avoiding cheating and bluffing, about defining algorithms that give quality instead of quantity results. But in the end are the quality criteria applied not just a filter that has been chosen by a group of poeple? Shouldn’t we, the users at least be in the position to have access to the criteria of priorization. Be it as it may, I believe that we have to learn to deal with quantities if we want to avoid patronization, if we want to be participants. Perhaps we moved already far beyond this point where independent thoughts and judgements are a serious aim.
At the end of this philosophical turmoil a few links to counterbalance the dominance of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. It is worthwhile in any case to counterbalance these super-powers.
General search engine: www.cuil.com
Meta-search engines: www.widow.com
www.zuula.com
Search engines with wiki philosophy (user participation)
www.mahalo.com
www.clusty.com
This is only a selection, not a complete listing.
