Google

The be all and end all of internet searchery...

Its not you know. Have you noticed how so much of google is advertising? At the same time have you got this feeling that Google are slowly insidiously taking over the world? That's because they are. So they've got Google Earth – which is great – and Google Video/Youtube, and Gmail which isn't as good as Yahoo! Mail, but they're no better, they've got Flickr. They've got Blogger and Sketchup too. That Google desktop manager. I installed it on my work pc but I wouldn't put it on my home one. Its a security risk. It indexes your files to make it easier for you to find stuff, so far so what. But where does it put the index of your files? On a Google server that's where. I know its only an index but still, I wouldn't knowingly give my bank statements index to the world's biggest search engine to keep safe.

There are search engines called meta-crawlers. I don't what that means, I imagine that sand people live in them, or worse. Meta-Crawlers are dead clever. Instead of just looking on one search engine when you type something in, they look on all of them at once. There's metacrawler.com This searches Google, Yahoo!, MSNSearch and Ask. The problem is that it tends to throw up the top 10 most popular choices from each site at the same time, which means there are lots of identical results.

But there's a very old free program that I hadn't used since 2001 called Copernic Agent. Here it is. This searches 10 of the biggest search engines, except Google, then filters everything nicely for you.

As I do lots of research as part of work, I'm finding loads of stuff that just isn't on Google.

Very handy.