--On Saturday, September 11, 2010 10:05 PM -0700 Robert Holtzman <hol...@cox.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 05:34:25PM -0600, Michael Loftis wrote: >> >> >> --On Saturday, September 11, 2010 3:33 PM -0700 Robert Holtzman >> <hol...@cox.net> wrote: >> >> > On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 03:21:51PM -0400, Simon Ponder wrote: >> >> What other engine do you use, if you do not mind me asking? >> > >> > ..........snip.......... >> > >> > Icerocket, although it's been getting flaky on me as of late. >> >> Uhm, news flash. Icerocket's web search IS GOOGLE. I think it's blog >> search is also google based, I'd have to dig, but, looks a bit like the >> Google news or groups search. > > I did a little digging. Running a search on "icerocket + google" turned > up several sites that contrasted icerocket and google. If there was > anything linking the two, I missed it. Can you supply a URL for your > conclusion? > The fact that their web search result pages are nearly identical to Google's (minus the upper header actually), and results are identical to Google. Just do some comparison searches. They find the same numbers of pages, rank them the same, and are using the same extracts/excerpts. I really highly doubt they've enough spidering capacity to replicate Google's results so closely. The fact that their nothing found/error page also contains Google's nothing found/error language verbatim points to this as well. As for their blog search, it also looks like the Google Blog Search API Data, with some form of additional filtering, exactly what they're doing there I'm not sure. Icerocket is very clearly someone whose written a UI for Google searches, there's nothing there to suggest otherwise. In web searches especially they're *identical*. The likelihood of two independent search databases of the web producing the EXACTLY same results for the first 15 for every single search I tested (I tried 6 of them, 'dog pile', 'google philanthropy', 'rock hunting', 'terranova space suit', 'feel good music', 'hockey pucks for sale' -- just random keyword strings really except for the google philanthropy one). And at a glance it also appears everything past the top 15 was identical too. Empirically, Icerocket web search is just google search API. If anyone here is self serving it's Icerocket. Try matching ANY other search engine against Google, (or against any other!) You're not going to get the same results. Even if they use the same algorithms, differing databases will produce different results. The only way to replicate the breadth and depth of Google's results is to have the many many many TB of search index capability that Google has. I'd be really surprised if their blog search isn't Google, the data that's there is what is represented in the API's. That one I haven't been able to figure out what they're doing to get those results, so they're offering something of value there. It certainly produces better results than blogsearch.google.com -- but maybe that's not the data stream that icerocket is using either. The simple fact that they're blatantly lifting Google web search though makes it pretty likely their blog search is based off Google data. The twitter search looks to me to be a wrapper around Twitter's own Search API as well, but I didn't spend any time looking into that. Their 'advanced search' syntax, is also identical to Google's (that's not saying much honestly, but it's one additional little thing) -- though they're filtering out at least some of the specialty search prefixes like links. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
