BBC News reports on search companies renewing their attempts to compete with Google. The article caused me to remiss on life before Google. Like most people I don’t even think about what search engine to you use anymore, reaching for Google has become an automatic reaction. The combination of the accuracy of search results plus the clean, uncluttered layout meant there was no reason to worry about using other search engines.
The article did prompt me to go back and re-discover some old search engines and I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only do they still exist but have been thoroughly revamped. In fact, I’ve actually decided to switch to Dogpile (UK) as my Safari home page! Why? Well, firstly, by aggregating results from MSN, Yahoo and Ask as well as Google it seems to find a few hits that get missed by individual search engines. I also earn iPoints just for searching!
The Google functionality I miss most is the ability to load a cached version of a page. Though I could work around that with some AppleScript.
We’ll see how long this lasts…
Twitter 
Plurk 
Buzz 
Delicious 
Digg 
Facebook 
MySpace 
Reddit 
Stumble
I do think we’ve become too google-dependent. I remember I used to use Excite or Altavista but slowly I’ve forgotten about, because now ‘googling’ has become synonymous with ’searching’.
I may join you…