Alternative Search Engines
JOSHUA COHEN
At the same time, I was investigating the more practical, or just more traditional, alternatives to Google: Bing (owned by Microsoft), Yahoo (operated by Google back then and by Bing now), Info.com (an aggregator of Yahoo/Bing, Google and others) and newer sites like DuckDuckGo and IxQuick (which don’t track your search history), Gibiru and Unbubble (which don’t censor results) and Wolfram Alpha (which curates results).
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Among the more entertaining challengers was Bananaslug.com: You type in a word and choose a category — Archetypes, Colors, Emotions — from which the site selects its own word to search in tandem. For instance, I typed in ‘‘Guantánamo’’ and chose the category Jargon Words; the site appended the word ‘‘parse.’’ The results of this collaboration comprised two types of hits: op-eds about the effects of closing the Guantánamo Bay prison and op-eds about the effects of keeping it open. Both sides found the future difficult to parse.
(…) Millionshort.com elides the top 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 or one million results of your search, providing more direct connection to less popular chatter. Wackosearch.com determines pertinence by impertinence: Search for “surrealism,” and get sites for the I.C.B.E. (the International Center for Bathroom Etiquette) and an online pregnancy test; search for “socialism,” get sites called Corpses for Sale or Create Farts, and feel proud that in America even irrelevancy is calculated — and while that irrelevancy is free, its method of calculation is proprietary.