Last week, Northwestern got Googled. I’m not talking about eager class-of-2013-ers trying to find the Rock Cam or overachieving Medill students trying to see how many times their names pop up. The Google bus actually parked on campus, set up shop and sang the praises of the search-engine gone life-management system.
I, for one, am a junkie. My whole life has devolved into little colored, bubbled boxes on a Google calendar, my iGoogle homepage gives me New York Times headlines and daily incarnations of Bejeweled and I’ve never even thought about setting foot in a library before hitting up that beautiful, blue red yellow and green beacon of hope. I think I’m justified in naming Google the king of the search engines — for God’s sake, they’re a verb now. That said, there exist tons of other, lesser-known search engines that may better fit the needs of more–how should I say– specific searchers. Google may be the one search engine to rule them all, but here are some other websites worth clicking through.
For the left-brained techie
Some people out there are genuinely math people. While I will never understand them, I’m told they exist and am hoping for the sake of my total ineptitude in that field that I will someday find one. If any of them are reading this, consider trading me homework help for the gift of Quintura, a search engine that instead of giving out a list of findings with descriptions, serves up its results in the form of a tag cloud. The links it delivers circle your search query, sized relative to their relevance and frequency of use. A cool novelty at any rate, but too much analysis for my BananaSlug self. Anyone who finds it logical and sweet, I have an econ problem set due next week.
For the technically inept or any high-maintenance searchers
Parents, grandparents, comparative French literature majors or anyone else who needs to be talked through the internet step by step, have no fear. ChaCha is here, offering live human responses for your random queries. ChaCha is actually a phone-based service, so it can be used from home in place of internet searches, or while traveling. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know that I would want to verbalize about most of the things I browse on the internet. But if your search topics are safe for external validation, ChaCha lets you essentially make someone else Google it for you.
For the tree-hugging eco-nut or Armani aficionado
Being environmentally conscious is helpful for the earth I guess, but more importantly, it’s totally in right now. Yes, you shop at Whole Foods, don’t use plastic bags, and pile on the organic sweaters to avoid cranking up the heat. But one-up the vegan next to you by fighting the great polluters Google by replacing it with Blackle. Though fundamentally identical, all of its pages are black, which allows it to incrementally cut back on energy use (since illuminating a white page requires more resources than a darker one). More importantly, however, it looks totally sweet. Even if you’re wearing sweat pants, desperately trying to gather 8 pages worth of information on Renaissance eating habits on day 3 without a shower, Blackle can help you keep it classy. I use it to add a little formality to my searches for cute animals and egg-shaped grooming tools.
For stalkers, straight up
Facebook is a great tool for keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances. But mostly it lets you pass vast amounts of time you don’t have stalking the hell out of people you vaguely know. Whether it’s making snap judgments on the favorite bands listed by someone in your econ class, or wondering just how happy your ex-boyfriend could possibly be with his new girlfriend, the social networking site can take you pretty far. For anyone looking to take their stalking one step further, however, there’s Lycos.com. Similar to Google or Yahoo!, it also has an extensive Yellow Pages search. So if you want to add phone number, relatives and address to that list of everything you know about people you’ve never met, this is the way to go. Just hope Chris Hanson won’t be lurking behind that door.
For class clowns or people who write columns about random junk they find on the internet
I don’t know about you guys, but a vast majority of my Google usage is for non-serious, non business-related searches. Even if you are trying to search something legit, you can find funnier, more interesting results by searching it through the annoying little brother of the search engine family, BananaSlug. Type anything into the search bar, and BananaSlug will attach to it a second, unrelated word to make your searches goofier. My test search word, “couch,” was paired with “victor” and earned me a marine geology evaluation and a synopsis of an episode of The Young and the Restless. Suddenly, my research paper is WAY more interesting.