For example, search for the word 'man,' and you get images almost entirely of white men, albeit of varying ages. A search for the word 'woman' also reveals an overwhelming majority of young, white women. Considering that the majority of the global population is non-white, we do immediately see how white, western-centric biases -- from race and gender beliefs to cultural standards of beauty and value -- dominate the very way the web works and what stories it tells about humanity.
Google is the Westernized, for-profit steward of our ever-expanding digital reality, but it wasn't always so. Back in the late '90s, Google Search was competing with a handful of other engines, most of which have faded into the ether by now.
Here's a look back at three search engines that Google gobbled up nearly 20 years ago. Ask Jeeves was a character-driven search engine, if ever there was one. Founded in , Ask Jeeves featured a well-dressed valet who supposedly fetched search results and was able to understand questions posed in everyday phrasing. Natural language processing is still tricky for developers today -- just ask Siri anything -- so this was a daunting pre-Y2K goal. Ask Jeeves lasted until roughly , when it was rebranded as Ask.
If humanity's knowledge is a series of books, Dogpile is an attempt to let people read more than one volume. The site, founded in , is a metasearch engine that collects results from a range of sources. The site's mission is driven by data -- in , Dogpile partnered with the Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University to study results from the four most popular search engines of the day, Google, Ask. Here's a quick summary of what researchers found :.
The overlap across the first page of search results from all four of these search engines was found to be only a staggering 0. Dogpile is technically still live, though it looks like something out of the early s. Dogpile is ranked No. AltaVista was the site best-situated to actually take on Google. By , AltaVista was the most popular search engine around, bringing in millions in revenue and becoming the exclusive backbone of Yahoo search results.
The site was hit hard when the dot-com bubble burst in the early s. In August , Dogpile and Petfinder agreed to a search partnership. In November , Dogpile launched its "Search and Rescue" program, which donates money to animal-related charities. In April , Dogpile collaborated with researchers from University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University to measure the overlap and ranking differences of leading Web search engines in order to gauge the benefits of using a metasearch engine to search the web.
Results found that from 10, random user-defined queries from Google, Yahoo! Another study later that year using 12, random user-defined queries from Google, Yahoo! These studies showed that each search engine provides vastly different results.
Dogpile realized that searchers are not necessarily finding results they were looking for in one search engine and thus decided to redefine their existing metasearch engine to provide the best results. Dogpile lists following features: [22]. Anonymous Not logged in Create account Log in. Hand W iki. From HandWiki. Namespaces Software Discussion. More More Languages. This showed that the kind of results a user would receive from a web search depended on which engine that they used and they were not even close to being the same.
When the researchers revealed the results of their studies, Dogpile realized that there was a need to make some big changes. People who were searching the web were not getting the information that they were looking for returned on the first page of search results. Dogpile was inspired to redefine their own existing meta-search engine so they could improve on the results that were being delivered to those submitting queries.
Dogpile seeks to continually improve the quality and relevance of the results that their search engine fetches for users submitting a query. They offer category links which aid users in focusing their search on specific categories. Some options include, News, Audio, and other broad categories so they can begin by defining the type of results that they are looking for.
By adding this extra definition, the results of the search are even more defined over conducting a more broad search in all or any category. Dogpile has an interesting representative who appears on their front page. Arfie is the dog that all users see.
The use of this really cool visual brings together the jargon under a canine themed search engine that retrieves fetches. These are terms that other search engine uses but having the name Dogpile and the Arfie character representing the site just seems to wrap the dog theme together in a neat and tidy package. Here is a fun fact about Dogpile.
When it comes to conducting an informal study about how popular interests change over a period in time, this section will let you know what most people are looking for.
To start, Google uses a variety of different search engines to retrieve information on queries. This includes Google, Bing and others. This is because they are structured slightly different and use different resources to obtain their fetches. Dogpile news features some great educational resources for kids. Dogpile is a great resource for home schooling parents as well as for kids that are hungry to gain more knowledge on a topic.
Here is yet another interesting fact about Dogpile that most people are not aware of. They made their announcement in the February edition of the magazine. Reviewers gave Dogpile very high marks for its Dogpile Toolbar and other useful features that makes it easy to use. Their Web Search, the popup blocker and its built in option for highlighting search terms within a page were all things that the reviewers believed make the site one of the best search engine options on the web.
When Google won a search engines award from PC World, Dogpile was right behind it as a runner up within that category. The searching of multiple leading engines simultaneously is one of the attributes that makes Dogpile so highly favored among those more familiar with it.
Another interesting fact about Dogpile is that after it fetches the results of your search it automatically organizes the results into separate groups by category. It offers an option that is considered to be quite innovative that is called Refine Your Results. This helps users to make their search results even more relevant so they can more precisely find the information that they are looking for in a faster time frame.
Dogpile is a company that is interested in continually improving their services for the end user.
0コメント