2000 Search Engine Watch Awards
By Danny
Sullivan
Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com
Jan. 22, 2001
The Search Engine Watch Awards recognize outstanding achievements in web searching. The winners for accomplishments during 2000 are below:
Outstanding Search
Service
Google
Best Meta Search Engine
Ixquick & Dogpile
Most Webmaster
Friendly Winner
Google
Best Specialty Search
Moreover
Hall Of Fame
Yahoo, Open Directory, FindLaw
Other Nominations & Suggestions
This is the first time the Search Engine Watch Awards have been given. In December 2000, readers of Search Engine Watch's monthly newsletter, the Search Engine Report, and its twice-monthly newsletter, the Search Engine Update, were invited to vote on their favorite services in three set categories. They were also allowed to suggest other categories. An example of the voting form can be found here.
The votes and suggestions were used by Search Engine Watch's editor, Danny Sullivan, for making his final decision for award winners. More details about each of the award categories and winners is below.
This category recognizes outstanding performance in helping Internet users locate general information from across the World Wide Web.
Winner: Google
"Our goal is to produce no holds barred, the best search available," said Google's cofounder and CEO Larry Page, just after the company received major investment in 1999. Google has delivered on that goal during 2000.
I consistently receive positive feedback from my readers and members of the public who are pleased with the relevancy of Google's results. There's no doubt that Google has raised the bar about the quality users should expect from a web search service.
In the online voting, Google was also the clear favorite, gaining 28 percent of the 1,400 valid votes for this category, well above the closest other service.
"It's fast, clean and accurate," one person commented, neatly summarizing what many others who voted said they liked about the service. "Google is just plain superb. I always find what I need without any unnecessary advertisements or dead links. Google is simple yet powerful," said another person.
Honorable Mention: Yahoo
Honorable mention goes to Yahoo. With 14 percent of the vote, Yahoo had only half as many votes as Google, but it still stood apart from the other major search services. Yahoo's long use of human categorization continues to make it one of the most popular search services on the web. Yahoo is also a Hall Of Fame winner.
Other Notable Results
AltaVista earned 11 percent of the vote, followed by Ask Jeeves with 10 percent and FAST with 7 percent. Other services polled at 4 percent or less of the vote.
This category recognizes outstanding performance in helping Internet users "meta search" or gather results from many web search engines by using one single service. For examples, see the Metacrawlers area within Search Engine Watch.
Ixquick is a little known service that more people interested in meta search should consider. It's easy to know exactly which search engines will be queried or to choose exactly the ones you want. Ixquick's "star" scoring system is easy to understand and generally helps you spot the sites that more than one search engine reports as relevant. Importantly, Ixquick does not dilute the quality of its results by mixing in too many links from various paid placement search engines. Instead, it only carries paid links from GoTo, and these are easy to remove, if desired.
Dogpile is unique among the major meta search services in that it presents results from each of the search engines it queries individually, instead of mixing them all together into a single list. This different approach seems to have given Dogpile a loyal following, causing it to win in the online voting.
Honorable Mention: qbSearch
Honorable mention goes to qbSearch, a relatively new search tool that, like Dogpile, stitches the search results from more than one search engine into a single page.
Other Notable Results
During the second week of online voting, results were skewed when MetaCrawler and Dogpile (both owned by InfoSpace) encouraged their users to vote for them via links to the Search Engine Watch Awards nomination form. Both services did ask permission to do so before adding the links and shouldn't be faulted for it. However, I ultimately decided to consider only the first week's votes for this category, feeling they provided a better sense of what my readers themselves considered to be the best meta search engine.
From only the first week's results, Dogpile was the clear winner, gaining 28 percent of 220 valid votes. MetaCrawler had 21 percent, Mamma had 18 percent, Ixquick had 8 percent and Search.com had 5 percent of the votes. All others had 4 percent or less.
For the curious, in the second week, about 1,500 additional votes were received. That meant for the entire two weeks, there were 1,736 valid votes. Almost all of the votes received in just the second week were for either Dogpile or MetaCrawler. Of all votes cast, in both the first and second weeks, MetaCrawler drew 47 percent and Dogpile received 42 percent.
The idea behind this category is to allow readers to vote for search engines, either human-powered or crawler-based, that they felt sent them the most traffic. In retrospect, it may have been better to ask readers to vote for the search engines they felt did the best job in representing the content of their sites. Nevertheless, some of those responding clearly understood this later definition as an important factor.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to rely on all 700 votes received. Many people clearly voted for search engines not based on webmaster criteria but instead because they liked them from a searcher point of view.
To compensate for this, I counted only the 71 votes that also included comments explaining why the person voting felt that the search engine was webmaster friendly.
Winner: Google
Google was the clear winner, picking up 28 percent of the 71 valid votes. Many of the comments reflected the fact that webmasters do not necessarily favor a search engine they can manipulate but rather one that rewards good content. Here's a sampling of what was said:
- Between Yahoo's Google-based results, and the results from Google.com, Google delivers more than twice the traffic than it's nearest competitor and requires little extra optimization efforts beyond writing good copy and meta tags.
- Has a fast submission form -- no surprises, if you use proper meta tags and have a good site you are sure to get a top spot.
- Highly relevant results for most relevant keywords, zooming to the most relevant site (mine!).
- It regularly revisits my pages every week, and I constantly find that new pages are being listed, bringing in traffic under new keyword searches.
- It was the first to spider my site and allow users of Yahoo to find my site before I got ranked within the Yahoo directory, which took much longer.
- It's the engine that combines two good qualities - it digs deep into the site and spiders almost all pages, and it has a great number of users performing searches (especially since the deal with Yahoo! The google.yahoo.com traffic is already equal to the regular Google traffic).
- It's too hard to get into Yahoo, and AOL is inconsistent. Google sends traffic month on month. It's used by Yahoo, so refers loads of Yahoo users -- but it refers a huge amount of traffic in its own right.
- Sends me a lot of BUYERS, not just traffic.
- Sends most traffic, since it seems to pick up on sites listed in the Open Directory.
- Site statistics going up! Submit 1 page and get 80 odd indexed.
- Link Popularity can be a hassle but worth it.
- This is the only search engine that has found my page.
- Very quick to pick up on new sites -- plus their listings bleed into other search engines.
- Way above everything else. I register my site regularly at dozens of the main engines, and Google just keep sending them in droves while I hardly get anything from the others. Thank God Yahoo uses Google!
NOTE -- despite some comments above, Google doesn't index meta tags or make use of meta data as part of its ranking system.
Honorable Mentions: Yahoo, AltaVista & The Open Directory
Honorable mentions goes to Yahoo, which gained 15 percent of the vote, and to AltaVista and the Open Directory, which both gained 14 percent. Below are some comments about each:
Yahoo
- Listing provides the most traffic.
- Most of search traffic source from here.
- Most traffic from them, by far.
- Obviously it's used more than the rest, resulting in more traffic.
- Only voting for Yahoo based on your explanation -- it's probably the least webmaster-friendly, but it does send our clients the most traffic.
- The people at Yahoo are very accessible and easy to work with.
- Though I don't like them because its hard to get listed or changed, they do send the most traffic.
AltaVista
- A lot of people came to my site through AltaVista.
- Easy to get ranked well and high ROI.
- Fast updates and good volume of traffic.
- For the simple reason that AltaVista sends 60 percent of the traffic to my site. They are the only engine that has our web site on it. We do not know the "SECRET" of how to get on any others.
- They index your page in a day or two.
The Open Directory
- Easy to submit to, usually speedy listings, fair, and the data is used widely, so it helps your link to count in certain search engines.
- Honest and sometimes fast.
- In addition to sending me traffic directly, the Open Directory sends my listing to a large number of other search engines.
- It is easiest to get listed in appropriate categories.
- Sends traffic through its data users, like Google, AOL, and Netscape.
- They actually put my site in the correct spot. Yahoo never entered my site at all.
- They get the information out to other indexes and do a phenomenal job of bringing in the right customers.
- They respond to your inquiries.
Other Notable Results
All other search engines gained only 4 percent or less of the 71 votes that included webmaster relevant comments.
By the way, even when all 700 votes cast were counted, regardless of associated comments, Google still came out on top, with 20 percent of the votes. Yahoo had 19 percent, AltaVista had 13 percent and the Open Directory had 8 percent.
Because this was the first time the Search Engine Watch Awards have been offered, the nomination form allowed readers to suggest their own categories. Best Specialty Search was the second most popular suggestion (Worst Search Engine was first, see below).
A specialty search engine (also called a vertical search engine) allows you to search for information just within a particular topic. For examples, see the Specialty Search Engines area within Search Engine Watch.
No specialty search engines were listed on the nomination form, so not surprisingly, people didn't overwhelming vote for a particular service. Instead, various services were each suggested by one or two people, in most cases. To solve this, next year, I may ask for readers to suggest favorite specialty services to include, before creating the final voting form.
That's for next year. For this year, I selected among specialty services I've reviewed, read reviews about or received feedback from others about.
Winner: Moreover
News searching is a popular activity among search engine users, but general web search engines usually offer poor news results. In contrast, Moreover crawls a large number of sites with news content, making it easy to find the freshest information on current event topics. It is simply one of the best new specialty search services that I've seen and worth a place among anyone's bookmarks.
Honorable Mentions
The following specialty search services are worthy of honorable mentions, because of the unique and useful features they offer. They either appeared in 2000 or rose to prominence during that year.
Launched in 2000, it offers access to "invisible" or "deep web" content that ordinary web search services generally miss.
As with CompletePlanet, it offers access to invisible web content. It was launched before 2000 but deserves recognition alongside CompletePlanet.
FindSame finds sentences, paragraphs, or documents that have been duplicated on the web. Just feed it a URL or a block of text, and it will scan against its index of 200 million URL to look for matches. It's a great way to see if someone is stealing your content, or just to find documents that may be similar to one you like.
Looking for reference material? xrefer lets you search against information from encyclopedias, dictionaries, books of quotations and other reference works.
Other Notable Results
The following are other services nominated by those who participated in the poll, along with comments from those suggesting them, where available:
- Librarians' Index to the Internet: Librarians have painstakingly divided this site by subject. Each website entered is systematically checked each week to verify that links are not broken. Sites entered are professional, organizational, and reliable sources useful for quoting in dissertations, thesis and reports. It's often overlooked by the general public, but not by librarians whose job entails filing and locating the right material for the job.
- Lycos FTP Search
- MedExplorer & MedHunt: Both give a variety of [medical] information that answers the search query well without having to wade through promotional sites or non-relevant sites
- SciSeek Science Search Engine: SciSeek doesn't even index anything but high quality science site.
- SearchEdu: Searches university sites only, therefore gives results of high quality, if you are looking for research.
- Searchgov.com: Includes all levels of government, and generally seems to retrieve on-target web pages.
- TripAdvisor.com: They provide all the content you need to figure out where you want to go, what you should do when you get there - that kind of stuff.
The Hall Of Fame recognizes outstanding performance in helping Internet users locate information over an extended period of time.
Launched in 1994, Yahoo is one of the web's oldest search services and its most popular. Yahoo depends on human editors to categorize the web. Yahoo's decision to use humans, rather than automatic crawling, was a key factor in its current success. Yahoo is not without its flaws. In particular, it has come under criticism by site owners for taking too long to process listings, make change requests or adequately describe sites properly. Nevertheless, millions depend upon Yahoo each year to successfully locate what they are looking for. It has earned a well-deserved place in the Hall Of Fame.
Since 1996, this specialty search service for legal information has provided both a human compiled directory of legal resources and a crawler-based index of legal web pages. Before people were even talking about "vortals" and "vertical search engines," FindLaw was already serving as a definition of how specialty search can be useful to searchers.
Other Nominations & Suggestions
As explained in the introduction to Best Specialty Search, readers could suggest other categories not on the voting form. Other than Best Specialty Search, no awards are being issued for these other categories (though they will be considered for next year). However, I thought it might be interesting to show the suggestions, along with some of the nominations.
PLEASE KEEP IN MIND that because of the small numbers, you should be wary of considering these numbers as proof that a search engine is "worst," has the "best design," etc.
For links to some of the services named, please see the Major Search Engines area within Search Engine Watch.
Worst Search Engine
The most popular suggested category was "Worst Search Engine." Of the 42 votes for "Worst Search Engine," AltaVista received the most, 8. AOL Search was close behind, with 7 votes. Ask Jeeves, LookSmart and Yahoo tied for third, getting 4 votes each against them. Go and iWon each got 3 votes, followed by NBCi with 2. The following services each received 1 vote against them: Excite, Inktomi, Lycos, MSN Search, Northern Light, The Open Directory and Sprinks.
Best Design
Another popular category suggestion was "Best Design," meaning either the most user-friendly site, best search interface or just nicest look. Dogpile came in tops with 4 votes, followed by Google and MetaCrawler, with 3 votes. AltaVista, iWon and Yahoo each got 2 votes. These services each got 1: Ask Jeeves, GoTo and Lycos.
A related suggestion, "Easiest To Use," saw Ask Jeeves, Google, MetaCrawler and Yahoo all get votes.
Both Yahoo and Ask Jeeves also received 2 votes each for "Worst Design."
Best Directory / Best Crawler
Some people suggested that there should be separate categories for "Best Directory" (uses human categorization) or "Best Crawler" (uses automated crawling of the web). I specifically did not create such categories, because most services these days make use of both human powered and crawler-based information. Also, many users have difficulty classifying services as a directory or crawler.
Best Mascot
While it may sound silly, perhaps search engines should consider having a mascot to encourage loyalty. Eight people suggested that Best Mascot should be a category. All but two put forth Dogpile's "Arfie" to win, but the Lycos dog received 1 vote, as did Jeeves from Ask Jeeves.
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Sullivan
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