Back on the Dogpile

I tried out the useful Web metasearch engine, Dogpile, years ago, found it pretty good, but then never made that much use of it in the end, it's probably more aligned with really difficult searches you might need to perform for heavy research. I think I'll have another go now - made a favorite button for it and all. Then there's also Metacrawler and Webcrawler to check out (all 3 metasearch engines are provided by Infospace - and they say the following "No single search engine covers the entire Internet. Different engines use different technologies and thus draw different results from the vast pool of available information. Our metasearch-driven searches cover more of the Internet because they combine the most relevant returns from multiple search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and Windows Live Search"). Apparently "A recent study found that only 1.1 percent of the first page results are the same across all four engines [Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves]". does Ask Jeeves even exist anymore? ahh, of course, they are Ask.com now and own a bunch of other sites.

I've also been interested in what people search for on the web, and came across this (now dated) article of the most popular Internet search terms (excluding 'adult content') using Dogpile in 2005, and "music lyrics" topped it, followed, of course, by lots of celebs and even "wedding vows". That article went on to say that lyrics topping the searches was surprising given big events in world news, although web-searching is all about "finding information that does not have a readily-known source".

Lycos in 2007 had "poker", "saddam hussein execution" (sick ppl), and "britney spears", interesting, but then whoever uses lycos? (perhaps in metasearches?)

And more interestingly, since Google handles ~60% of global web searches (50% in the US) as at Oct'07, if you trust that poll, the most popular things googled in 2007:

1. american idol
2. youtube
3. britney spears
4. 2007 cricket world cup
5. chris benoit
6. iphone
7. anna nicole smith
8. paris hilton
9. iran
10. vanessa hudgens

and as for most Googled questions: who is god, what is love and how to kiss topped the lists.

Google Hot Trends has what people are checking out at the moment (apparently updated several times a day). interesting.

and this is an intriguing article for where the world's most frequent searches originate. For example, "Egypt, India and Turkey are the world's most frequent searchers for Web sites using the keyword "sex" on Google search engines"; whilst others, include:

"Hangover" - Ireland, United Kingdom, United States (not much of a surprise! Australia must've been close behind);
"Terrorism" - Pakistan, Philippines, Australia;
"Marijuana" - Canada, United States, Australia;
and even "Love" - Philippines, Australia, United States. ???

also, another handy hint, i didn't know that you can use ".." to search in a range of numbers, eg. seach "war 1810..1820" to find the 1812 war.

ok, that's enough web research before i actually search for what i was intending to before... what was it again? electroanalytical techniques used in pharmaceutical analysis... or something?