Art of the Search Engine

23 May 2009 4 Comments

by madsilence in Art, Life, Thoughts Tags: google, google doodle, Search engine

Google continues its efforts to establish itself as the world’s premiere search engine.  Their strategy is broad and far-ranging, addressing multiple populations, including us art lovers.  Today’s Google doodle celebrates the life of artist Mary Cassat.

Google doodles, the drawings that are designed on, around and through the Google logo on its home page, have long been part of Google’s history.  We’ve written about them before.

Doodle 4 Google, a competition where K-12 students are invited to reinvent Google’s homepage logo.  Google partners with the Smithsonian’s, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum for the competition. We love the Cooper Hewitt!

What’s become evident is that the Internet contains an amazing volume of data, difficult to sort and transform into useful information.  Search engines are tools that can help us.   And Google isn’t the only one.

Searchme.com provides a visual alternative to Google.  Try this search for “art” and flip though the pages of results.

BananaSLUG provides a different way of looking at the Internet.  The search engine search engine “designed to promote serendipitous surfing” by “throw[ing] in a random word from a category of your choice. This results in pages you probably overlooked. They all have your search term in them, but the added twist gives you something new every time.”

With  Spific The Finding Engine you can search the entire Internet or Select a specific topic for a tailored search experience.

Leapfish is described as “the first multi-dimensional information aggregator and search portal in the world. Our goal is to gather, organize and render the most relevant information from the internet’s most valuable destinations for each users search, in one single simple shot.”

New Statistics from Pew: Search Engine Use:

The percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of just under one-half (49%). With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60% of internet users who use email, arguably the internet all-time killer app, on a typical day.

Looking for other ways to tame the beast that is the World Wide Web?  Go to:  Web Search FAQ: The Most Popular Web Search Questions Answered for some answers.

~MadSilence

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