{"id":1083,"date":"2023-03-08T16:45:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-08T16:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/?p=1083"},"modified":"2026-06-29T14:09:54","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T14:09:54","slug":"the-search-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/?p=1083","title":{"rendered":"The Search Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/div>\n

 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Sichuan Zhongshuge Store<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

No one remembers the Search Wars! Dang!<\/p>\n

They occurred between 1997 – 2003 or so. It was a time when a dominant search engine, Google, had not yet risen to power. Multiple search engines vied for top spot. What was top spot, you say? It was “most pages indexed”.<\/p>\n

How were the Wars fought? Each week, researchers would depth-check each search engine. Back then Yahoo was really the one folks thought <\/i>would win, AskJeeves was in there, I think some Microsoft ones were in there.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Method:<\/p>\n

They would search for something that does not exist. The results, therefore, would contain the entire pool of sites that the search engine HAD<\/i> indexed and said, essentially, NOPE, not there, we don’t have that and we’ve checked everywhere.<\/p>\n

How do you search for something that does not exist? Easy. Put your fingers over a keyboard and starting hitting keys.<\/p>\n

Example:<\/p>\n

fhdakfjklpoiovpoie<\/p>\n

That ^ does not exist.<\/p>\n

A return number on that from a search engine (yes, they used to return numbers, not today’s hopeless signal of ‘Next: 2, 3, 4,…27 million’) would tell you how many total web pages that engine had indexed.  It was tracked week to week.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yes, Google eventually won the Search Wars.<\/p>\n

But even now, there are pockets that Google just can’t get to.  See below.<\/p>\n

Good hunting, Rebels.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

August 2020 stats on Search Engine sizes,<\/a> now measured by “market”.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile,
\n there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who
\nspecialize in books, science, other smart information.
Keep a list of sites you never heard of.<\/p>\n

www.refseek.com – Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.<\/p>\n

www.worldcat.org
\n – a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find
\nout where lies the nearest rare book you need.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/link.springer.com – access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.<\/p>\n

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/repec.org – volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.<\/p>\n

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.<\/p>\n

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.<\/p>\n

www.base-search.net
\n is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More
\nthan 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/div>\n

 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Sichuan Zhongshuge Store<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

No one remembers the Search Wars! Dang!<\/p>\n

They occurred between 1997 – 2003 or so. It was a time when a dominant search engine, Google, had not yet risen to power. Multiple search engines vied for top spot. What was top spot, you say? It was “most pages indexed”.<\/p>\n

How were the Wars fought? Each week, researchers would depth-check each search engine. Back then Yahoo was really the one folks thought <\/i>would win, AskJeeves was in there, I think some Microsoft ones were in there.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Method:<\/p>\n

They would search for something that does not exist. The results, therefore, would contain the entire pool of sites that the search engine HAD<\/i> indexed and said, essentially, NOPE, not there, we don’t have that and we’ve checked everywhere.<\/p>\n

How do you search for something that does not exist? Easy. Put your fingers over a keyboard and starting hitting keys.<\/p>\n

Example:<\/p>\n

fhdakfjklpoiovpoie<\/p>\n

That ^ does not exist.<\/p>\n

A return number on that from a search engine (yes, they used to return numbers, not today’s hopeless signal of ‘Next: 2, 3, 4,…27 million’) would tell you how many total web pages that engine had indexed.  It was tracked week to week.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yes, Google eventually won the Search Wars.<\/p>\n

But even now, there are pockets that Google just can’t get to.  See below.<\/p>\n

Good hunting, Rebels.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Search Wars”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[438,435,437,436],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ask-jeeves","category-google","category-search-engine","category-search-wars","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1083"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1086,"href":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083\/revisions\/1086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cogitateandpercolate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}