Google isn't just the most popular search engine in the world; it's the most popular website in the world, too. Considering there are more than half a billion sites on the Internet, that's pretty dang popular. It's also pretty dang boring. I mean, finding a useful link on the first page of your query results nearly every time? Where's the fun in that!That's why I set off down the recursive rabbit hole to discover what other search engines are still in use today. Naturally, the first thing I did was Google the phrase "search engines." The results were…counterintuitive:I guess when I used the number one site in the world to search for the thing that it is, I expected the first organic result to be, you know, it. But as you can see, it wasn't. Instead, Dogpile topped the list, with AltaVisata — AltaVista — of all destinations coming in fourth. (Yeah, it's owned by Yahoo! these days — the fourth most popular site on the 'net, coincidentally — but still. Alta-freakin'-Vista?)Anyway, I rolled with the redirect and decided to Dogpile (we all agree that if "Google" can be used as a verb, any search engine's name can be, right?) the phrase "search engines" next. As before, the results were unexpected:
Bing? Bing? This is unacceptable. To see Ask.com behind door number 2 only further undermined my faith in our boolean rulers. But in for a penny, in for $611.02 (give or take), so I swung over to the Microsoft latecomer and tried my magic words one more time:
And just like that, we were back to Dogpile again and the infinite recursion had begun. I don't know what sort of arrangement these two querulous query quarries have worked out, but it seems pretty cozy.
To see if I could break out of the loop, I went for some sloppy seconds and — per Google’s suggestion — switched over to YahltaVistoo (or whatever) to search for answers. Wait, Dogpile again? What kind of ring are they running?
So Dogpile told me Bing, and Bing’s second choice was Webcrawler, so Webcrawler told me… well, that Bing is a sponsor and that Dogpile is good enough to not have to pay for its reputation. Does this mean Dogpile is the greatest search engine on the web? It’s certainly very searchable, but all this shooting back and forth between engines like an Internet poltergeist has left me with more unanswerable questions than the original Ask Jeeves. It’s also left me with a bit of a mobius headache, so if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to crawl (no pun intended) into bed and wait for the fractalated nightmares to stop.
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