Trying to break the Google habit

[gkd_uk]

Google's dominance of the search market, which in the UK stands at 75%, is increasingly being challenged by rivals desperate to become popular with a generation of web users growing up with Google as their homepage.

Given that search is the number one web activity and intrinsic to the fabric of online life it is perhaps strange that most people are content to limit their information-seeking to just one search engine.

With few studies to prove that Google's results are significantly better than its rivals, search engines such as Ask are keen to persuade users to experiment with the alternatives.

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[Instigator]

"There have been no real studies to prove that Google has better results but people think that the results are better,"

Why do people believe that we always need a study to prove something? What kind of study is needed in this case?

I use Google because the serps are the most relevant. Yahoo are pants and MSN aren't much better. Ask are too slow to update, that's their biggest downfall IMHO.

I do hope other search engines can raise their game, however. I worry about the dominance of Google. One of my sites gets well over 30,000 visitors a month from Google, yet Yahoo provides less than 1,000. Good if my site stays highly ranked, but would be a nightmare if their algo were to change.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Google got where they are today because their results were better.

WITHOUT DOUBT (IMO) the best algorithm was NEVER google's it was ALWAYS Teoma's Teoma were using clustering way before anyone else (HITS)and it was TRULY the mutts nutts. Problem was their pissy database it was simply too small to deliver the high quality that Google with their pile it high and sell it cheap method of low cost data storage were delivering.

I would REALLY like to see the teoma (now ask) algo running the Yahoo database. THAT would be a google killer. I never worked out why Yahoo went for everyone else and yet ignored Teoma. They basically bought everyone bar google and ask