Some time ago I started to look into Google Search alternatives. This had a number of reasons, from too much noise on Google results pages over deteriorating quality to privacy concerns. I first switched to Bing, the most prominent alternative market share wise. And while it proved to be a solid search engine, especially for [...]

Categories: Search Engines

When you search on Google you often get results that have nothing to do with your original search query. Take the search for Appel for instance. You probably would not expect sites about Apple in the search results. Google on the other hand thinks that is what the user is looking for and displays three [...]

Categories: Google

Search giant Google lately has added Google +1 buttons to nearly every web property the company owns. Most Google users may notice the +1 buttons on Google search result pages where they are placed next to each site url. In addition, users who are logged in see if they or their Google+ friends have recommended [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, Google Chrome

One of the stories that dominated tech news yesterday was that Mozilla started shipping a version of the Firefox browser with Microsoft’s Bing search engine as the default search engine instead of Google Search. Some news sites made it look like as if Mozilla dropped Google as the browser’s search provider in favor of Microsoft’s [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, Search Engines

Advanced search operators like the + or – symbols can be used to optimize a search. The – operator for instance makes sure that the term following is not included on pages in the search results. An example for this is the query technology -blog which would only display results that would match the technology [...]

Categories: Google, Search Engines

If you have been using Google Search in past years you may have noticed a cached and similar link next to nearly every search result on Google. The cached entry linked to a cached copy of the web page that Google stored on their own servers. The similar link on the other hand listed related [...]

Categories: Google, Search Engines

Google back in May 2010 enabled https on their core search domain. Users back then were able to access https://www.google.com/ manually for improved security and privacy on the Google Search engine. Google quickly ran into a problem that the company did not anticipate at the time. Companies, organizations and schools began to block the search [...]

Categories: Google

The Bing homepage and the Google homepage have several things in common. They both embed a search form prominently on the page. The page itself has been designed to be almost distraction free. Both pages have something else in common; Media on the page. The Google page displays so called Doodles instead of the standard [...]

Categories: Search Engines

A recent search engine trend is to personalize the user experience. You can best see this on Google Search, where you not only see personalized search results based on previous searches and activities, but also +1′s by friends. If you take ten users and ask them to search on Google Search for the same topic, [...]

Categories: Microsoft, Search Engines