On July 8, Yahoo! shut down 18-year-old search engine AltaVista.
Its servers were switched off, its algorithms silenced, its web crawlers
laid to rest. Back in 1997, a year before Google first appeared online,
AltaVista raked in two million hits per day. AltaVista was one of the
most successful search engines to launch in the mid-90s. That success
didn't last long in the age of Google, and AltaVista was purchased by
Yahoo! in 2003 and eventually relegated to obscurity.
AltaVista's death is a reminder that, pre-Google dominance, there were a ton
of search engines with their own quirks, specialties, and varied
indexes of the web. Searching one wasn't guaranteed to deliver the same
results as the others. The World Wide Web didn't quite feel like a
wholly interconnected web, just yet--each search engine or web crawler
was a nexus into a unique corner of the Internet.
AltaVista also
established a precedent of branching out from search that Google would
later build upon. Long after it had lost popularity as a search engine,
AltaVista's Babel Fish was the go-to online language translator. And
while Google now serves as our general purpose search tool, and makes
the operating system for millions of smartphones, and runs the most
popular email platform on the web, and dominates Internet advertising,
there are still those quirky, speciality search engines out there that
do things Google Search can't.
The
World Wide Web is far more interconnected and searchable than ever, but
it's also bigger than ever. In AltaVista's honor, we've hunted down
some of those search engines that still fill a special niche, gotten
advice from some Tested readers and highlighted a few old favorites that
once seemed amazing and have now been one-upped by the all-consuming
Google.
The Wayback Machine:
Archive.org's Wayback Machine is the ultimate search tool for things
Google can't find--because they no longer exist. According to
Archive.org's FAQ, the Wayback Machine hosts more than 350 billion
pages, taking up more than two petabytes of storage. Popular websites
will often have hundreds of entries archived over years of Wayback
crawls, but it's amazing how many obscure Geocities fansites are
preserved within the Wayback Machine.
Baseball-Reference:
There's no sport with a greater emphasis or appreciation for stats than
baseball. Baseball is as much about history as it is the current
season's games, and players are often famous more for their RBIs or home
runs or strikeouts over a dozen seasons than they are for individual
game-winning plays. Baseball-Reference.com has made all those records
and statistics searchable since 2000. And we mean all the records. Just look at the immense amount of detail on Hank Aaron's page, for example.
Wolfram Alpha:
The "computational knowledge engine" doesn't search the web like
Google, but it's definitely smarter--or at least better at math--than
our go-to engine. Wolfram Alpha's ability to spit back direct answers to
questions still feels a little bit like magic, and it offers a more
scientific approach to search results.
The results page for Tony Blair,
for example, lists notable facts about the British politician, his
governmental role, and one physical characteristic. Google has begun to
integrate Wolfram Alpha-like results into its search engine by showing
similar data for famous people (pulled from Wikipedia), showing weather
conditions, and so on.
Giphy:
Just a few months ago, Google added an option to narrow Image Search
results down to "animated," aka GIF search. Giphy is a brand new startup
that offers its own database of searchable GIFs, and each image is
tagged. A search for Metal Gear Solid, for example, brings back the
kinds of GIFs you'd expect, but a search for something more general--like the word joy--returns
very different results. Memes and more expressive GIFs pop up than in a
similar Google search. Giphy also tells you how many frames are in each
GIF, which is pretty cool.
TinEye:
Reverse image search is another tool Google has recently added to its
arsenal. But before Google added the ability to search by an existing
image, TinEye was an invaluable tool for finding out where a video
screencap came from, or to find a larger version of an image, or to
track down a mystery artist. TinEye doesn't search by image metadata,
but rather through recognition algorithms to identify similar or
identical pictures. Also, Google and TinEye present their findings
differently. TinEye is extremely focused on its database of 3 billion
images, but Google actually uses an image to, first and foremost, return
web page results that host a similar image.
Creative Commons Search:
Here's a simple one. When you search for a photograph on Flickr or
Google Images, often the photographer hasn't' given permission for that
photo to be used elsewhere online. So you trudge off, sullen, to find
something else. With a Creative Commons search, you can set narrow
search results for images, music, or other media that's shared under a
CC license.
Can I Stream It:
Just a couple years ago, if a movie or TV show wasn't on Netflix or
Hulu, you probably wouldn't plan to stream it online. But those days are
past--there are now so many competing popular video delivery services
with different movie studio deals that it's hard to keep track of what
is available where. Can I Stream It
is awesome because it searches all of them--streaming options like
Netflix and Amazon Instant and Epix, rental options like iTunes and
Vudu, even cable services like HBO and Comcast Xfinity. With an account
you can also set up notifications to be messaged when a movie becomes
available.
Duck Duck Go: This
search engine made a name for itself in 2012 by promising not to track
its users--Google's privacy issues over the past couple years have been
one of the unfortunate side effects of its massive web reach. But the
engine also highlights a ton of "goodies" or instant feedback tools akin
to Wolfram Alpha--doing matematic calculations, generating random
passwords, providing instant recipes. Google can do some of those
things, but not all of them, and Duck Duck Go offers a very clean,
simple interface.
Google Flights:
This may be one of Google's least-known search acquisitions, but it's a
great tool. Back in 2010, Google Purchased ITA Software, which ran the
airface search system QPX. Never heard of QPX? You've probably used
it--the engine was behind travel sites like Kayak, Orbitz, and
CheapTickets. Now that data is fed raw into Google Flights, without the
annoyance of a travel site trying to sell you hotel rooms or rental cars
alongside your plane tickets. We know including a Google site on the
list is cheating, but ITA Software built the technology before Google
bought them up--that counts, right?
Flightfox:
On the subject of airfare searches, Flightfox is a pretty awesome
person-driven flight tool. It's not a search engine, exactly, but a
pay-for service that draws upon the expertise of frequent flyers and
travel agents to net you the best possible deal on airfare. You can go
in pre-armed with knowledge about cheap flights and pay a few bucks for
the experts to find something cheaper, or describe a desired trip and
let them do all the work for you. While paying for Flightfox for short
or cheap domestic flights doesn't make much sense, you could potentially
save hundreds on major international flights by crowdsourcing the kinds
of people who know exactly how to snag the best airfare.
Honorable mentions: The Library of Congress' Thomas database, the subscription-based Galileo educational search database, and LexisNexis for legal documents.
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