JonesPC

Close to the beginning of this month, I wrote a blog post called "Is it time to start promoting other search engines along with Google". Since then, I decided to practice what I was preaching. I have been using other search engines to see if I could feel as comfortable with another search as I am with Google. The way I use the internet may seem kind of awkward but I’m going to try to explain it.

First, I always have 2 browsers open. One Firefox, and one IE7. I use a lot of tabs, every link I click on, I usually middle click so that it will open in a new tab. I use the search bar whenever I want to search for something, instead of going straight to Google.com. Firefox is my main browser, where I do most of my surfing, and IE7 is secondary. I always have a bunch of tabs open and sometimes I will have multiple browsers of each open with multiple tabs on each. Usually both search bars have Google as the default search.

What I did is switched the default search to Ask.com with Firefox, and Live.com with IE7. The reason I chose the search engines I did for the browsers is because I was expecting not to like Live.com. Since IE7 was my secondary browser, I figured that if I didn’t like live.com, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. I have head good things about Ask.com for a while, since they dropped the "Jeeves" so I was really expecting to like Ask.com.

Is Ask.com up to the task?

When I first started using Ask.com, there was something I noticed from the beginning that I liked. If you search for something you get your search results, but on the left sidebar there are suggestions of different variations of your search input. You can click on those suggestions and it will show results for those suggestions. I thought that was cool because sometimes I might type something when doing a search, and those suggestion may be better worded than what I typed for what I was looking for. On the right sidebar, Ask.com also gives you a few images that falls inline with your search, a Wiki summary, stock quotes and other things. Looking at that, I thought Ask.com was really cool. On the outside, it looks as if it was tons more useful than Google.

When I really started looking for things, thats when I really missed Google. I gave Ask.com a good honest try this whole time, but every search session ended up with me going to Google.com to find what Im looking for. Ask.com has sponsored results mixed in with regular results, and sometimes the results are way off from what I typed.

Another thing I do a lot in search engines is searching for images. Ask.com was horrible for this in my experience. The image search at Ask.com is good when you are looking for images that are different than what you would find at Google, but then again Google was a lot better for me.

needless to say Ask.com wasn’t really up to the task.

Is Live.com up to the task?

My secondary searching using IE7 was with Live.com, which I really expected to not like. If you haven’t been there lately, Live.com looks a lot like Google these days. Its simple, clean and the sponsored results are completely separate from your regular search results, which I like. I have to say, using Live.com was a pleasant change and it worked out pretty well for me. I very seldom had to go to Google and I really like Live.com’s image search.

If today Google disappeared and I had to use Live.com, I would live. Is it good enough to make it my main search while Google still exist? Not quite but its real close. I think next I will try out Yahoo.