The Search Wars

 

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No one remembers the Search Wars! Dang!

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".

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

 

Method:

They would search for something that does not exist. The results, therefore, would contain the entire pool of sites that the search engine HAD indexed and said, essentially, NOPE, not there, we don't have that and we've checked everywhere.

How do you search for something that does not exist? Easy. Put your fingers over a keyboard and starting hitting keys.

Example:

fhdakfjklpoiovpoie

That ^ does not exist.

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.

Yes, Google eventually won the Search Wars.

But even now, there are pockets that Google just can't get to.  See below.

Good hunting, Rebels.

August 2020 stats on Search Engine sizes, now measured by "market".

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.
Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.