Google Alternatives

May 30, 2004 10:59 AM

Lately, Google has been down a lot (or at least inaccessible from where I am). Does anyone know why this is? Also, what's the best search engine to use when you can't use Google?
posted by grumblebee to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Teoma
posted by invisible ink at 12:27 PM on May 30, 2004

I've had no problem with google. I think it's your end, man.
posted by angry modem at 1:12 PM on May 30, 2004

A9, iXquick
posted by milovoo at 1:18 PM on May 30, 2004

I think it's your end, but once I had that problem and went through one of google's data centers, it went away eventually but I never did figure out what caused it.

alltheweb is pretty good, I prefer the image search to google.
posted by bobo123 at 2:19 PM on May 30, 2004

If I'm doing some deep-searching, that is I know exactly what I'm looking for and want to include as much of the web as possible, I'll use Google *and* Alltheweb.

This data from last September shows that the two are comparable in size but from some deep searches I've done its clear that the Union of the two is even bigger.
posted by vacapinta at 2:48 PM on May 30, 2004

Google had a bad spell for several days a few weeks ago, I know. I think certain ISPs also hit problems with Google, particularly if the ISP uses transparent caching/proxying. In a reasonably well-publicised incident many users saw the Google logo replaced with random national flags last year, due to the corruption of some proxy servers at a major ISP.

This isn't the question you asked.. but if you want your results to look basically the same as Google's, go to Yahoo. Yahoo's index is still pretty similar to Google's, whereas AllTheWeb, Teoma, et al. will all be quite unique (but still good in their own ways).
posted by wackybrit at 3:36 PM on May 30, 2004

Oh, and I forgot to give you my 'solution' the Google access problems! I found that even though Google.com was failing here and there (up one minute, down the next), going to Google.co.uk, Google.fr, or any of the 'other' Googles (UK is probably best if you only speak English) worked okay.. and you can specify to search all pages, rather than the national ones.
posted by wackybrit at 3:39 PM on May 30, 2004

vivisimo.
posted by the aloha at 4:20 PM on May 30, 2004

i once had a problem with google and we (i went to the sysadmin because i assumed our conexn to the net was down if i couldn't see google...) half-convinced ourselves that the problem was due to one particular server being down and my machine somehow getting "stuck" on that machine as the IP address of www.google.com (on other machines, DNS mapped the name to other IP addresses, which worked fine). so if that's your problem, trying one of the numeric addresses listed in the link above, or one of the other international urls, should help.
posted by andrew cooke at 4:53 PM on May 30, 2004