EXCLUSIVES

SEARCH ENGINES

Words by Barbara Mende

There’s no suspense with this category. Is anyone surprised that Google is the winner?

Yahoo came awfully close. But Google has a special advantage for Mac users: The built-in Google toolbar in Safari. Many engines, including Google, offer their own toolbars that do the same thing with other browsers, but who would want to do serious searching without Safari’s Snapback?

Back in the day, there was a big reason not to choose Google: It didn’t allow wild cards or word variations. You had to do one search with “engine” and another with “engines.” That’s not true any more, thanks to the addition of “OR” searches and stemming technologies that pick up variations. If you want to design your own complex Boolean searches you can try AltaVista, but Google’s and Yahoo’s “advanced search” features - which are almost identical except for Google shortcuts to such features as “search for all things Mac” - will probably do what you need.

Google generally brings up the most hits, which is not all good news when you search on “Iraq” or “Paris Hilton.”

You can get a lot of information without leaving Google’s main search facility - or Yahoo’s or MSN’s. Definitions, calculators, stock quotes, currency converters, phone numbers, movie listings and flight schedules are among the many features accessible with one click. Google, however, incorporates more thoughtful user-friendly features. You can type a name, city and state or zip and get an address and phone number on MSN; you can type a phone number and get the name and address on Yahoo; but you can do both on Google.

Full-service search engines nowadays are portals. Unlike Yahoo and MSN, Google didn’t start as a portal. Its uncluttered interface, happily, attests to that. But it has everything you could want in a portal: mail, discussion groups, maps, shopping, pictures, financial reports and more. Google’s portal features aren’t quite up to Yahoo’s - which may be why it offers a choice of Google maps, Yahoo maps, and Mapquest after locating an address. But they include such imaginative offerings as Google Earth, now available in a Mac version, which gives pinpoint directions and tells you what restaurants and movies are at your destination as well as showing maps so accurate that security honchos have voiced concern.

Then there’s the S.G. Cowen report that concluded in December 2005 that typical Google users were wealthier and more net-savvy than other users. Who doesn’t want to be in that league?