Is Bigger Really Better? Is WebsBiggest really that big?
The latest and greatest enty into the search engine battlefield is a search engine that claims to be the biggest on the web. They use some questionable methods including a "virtual replica of the whois database" and allowing users to modify search listings for their own sites and other sites they don't own in a "wiki-style" database.
In their words:
Web’s Biggest lets webmasters add or revise the descriptions of their site free of charge. They even allow searchers to change the descriptions of websites they are familiar with. This lets individual searchers change everyone’s search results. The search engine stores all past descriptions of websites in a database so users can undo or correct descriptions. This makes Web’s Biggest the world’s biggest “wiki”.
Danny Sullivan isn't too impressed with the quality of search results. I have to agree that the results pretty much suck, especially for the few general searches I tried, including searches for "movies", "cars", and "jobs" -- all of which brought up a lot of junk search results with only a handful of relevant listings.
Danny also pointed out that their "random search" doesn't seem to do anything. It's supposed to bring up random results and show that they're this huge search engine, but it brings up the same results regardless of what number you put in. I tried it and experienced the same thing.
I'm sure this new search engine will get some initial attention due to their unique "features", as well as the fact that they've got Eric Ward helping them with their launch, but I really thing this new search engine is just a minnow trying to eat a whale. Nobody will use a search engine that doesn't give good search results, regardless of how large their "haystack" is. People don't really care about which search engine is biggest, they just care about finding what they want without having to sift through a bunch of junk. They claim that 20,000 webmasters have praised their search engine. Although I highly doubt this is true, it really doesn't matter. They can have all the webmasters in the world in love with them, but if they don't have any actual searchers using their search engine, it doesn't mean squat.
In their words:
Web’s Biggest lets webmasters add or revise the descriptions of their site free of charge. They even allow searchers to change the descriptions of websites they are familiar with. This lets individual searchers change everyone’s search results. The search engine stores all past descriptions of websites in a database so users can undo or correct descriptions. This makes Web’s Biggest the world’s biggest “wiki”.
Danny Sullivan isn't too impressed with the quality of search results. I have to agree that the results pretty much suck, especially for the few general searches I tried, including searches for "movies", "cars", and "jobs" -- all of which brought up a lot of junk search results with only a handful of relevant listings.
Danny also pointed out that their "random search" doesn't seem to do anything. It's supposed to bring up random results and show that they're this huge search engine, but it brings up the same results regardless of what number you put in. I tried it and experienced the same thing.
I'm sure this new search engine will get some initial attention due to their unique "features", as well as the fact that they've got Eric Ward helping them with their launch, but I really thing this new search engine is just a minnow trying to eat a whale. Nobody will use a search engine that doesn't give good search results, regardless of how large their "haystack" is. People don't really care about which search engine is biggest, they just care about finding what they want without having to sift through a bunch of junk. They claim that 20,000 webmasters have praised their search engine. Although I highly doubt this is true, it really doesn't matter. They can have all the webmasters in the world in love with them, but if they don't have any actual searchers using their search engine, it doesn't mean squat.
posted by Dave @ 8:33 AM
1 Comments:
At 12:00 AM,
Anonymous said…
It looks as though it is geared towards the US market. Every time I have tried to search (based in the UK) their servers are too busy. I have never experienced that with any other search engine.
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