Most people would say that Google is their favorite search engine. Hell, a lot of people think that Google is the only search engine, the same way some people refer to every soft drink as a "Coke." If Google is Coke, though, then Bing is Pepsi, and Blind Search is the Pepsi Challenge for search engines. Use it to take a blind taste of the results from Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, and find out which search engine you really prefer.

Considering the recently-announced Bing/Yahoo! partnership, you might want to go ahead and ignore the Yahoo! results. Regardless, it's still surprising to find out that Google doesn't turn out to be the best choice every time. Still, from the results Blind Search has collected so far, users appear to enjoy the great taste of Google 41% of the time, vs. 31% for Bing and 28% for Yahoo!

What did Blind Search tell you? Were you surprised by the results? Let us know in the comments.

[via Switched]

I know your secret.

You've searched online to find out what happened to an old flame, where your best friend from college ended up, or whether there are incriminating anecdotes about your boss on the Internet. Google will get you some good results, but use the new iSearch search engine created just for locating people and you'll probably find incriminating anecdote of your best friend and your old flame. With your boss. It's that good.

Simply type in a name and approximate location (the narrower the geographic area you choose, the more finely-tuned your results will be), then let iSearch do its thing. Soon you'll get a long list of names starting with exact matches and descending to near matches. Once you find the person you're looking for, you can choose to get information on your target's friend's professional contacts on LinkedIn, what social networks they're a part of, where they turn up on blogs or in the news, and even what email addresses and domain names are associated with them.

iSearch will also perform a public records search via and give you info on known addresses, bankruptcies, arrest records, and loads of other legal documents discoverable online. You'll need to pony up some cash for those goods, though, and pay anywhere from $2.99 to $49.95 to get the real skinny.

There are already some sites out there that do people searches and spit out public record information, but few do such a thorough job of it. Honestly, after searching my own name, I felt like I'd been x-rayed. And I know another secret. You're about to go check out your name at iSearch, too. Right?

[Via Wired]

Although it doesn't always get the most attention, Opera is a solid browser that continues to improve with each version. While they work on their next version, codenamed Peregrine (like the falcon), subtle improvements are being added to the current release, 9.51. The latest addition is Ask.com for the search bar.

What do we think is so interesting about that? First, it's a step toward competing with Firefox's search engine plugins. Although the promotion is focused on Ask, it also shows off Opera's expandable search bar to users who might not have known about it. Second, it's another option for people who don't want to rely exclusively on Google for their search results. We're looking forward to more from Opera in the near future.

Pdf search engine bills itself as a search engine to locate ebooks on the Internet. Enter in the title you are looking for and it scour the world wide web displaying links to pdf files it comes across that matches your search term.

But you'd be wrong if you thought pdf search engine was just a one trick pony. While it does call itself a book search engine, the site can also locate any pdf document that's out there. In our testing, we were able to locate tax return forms, DMV applications for specific states and other pdf documents floating around the 'net.

Powered by google, pdf search engine might be the site to visit when you're looking for pdf documents on the Internet. Or you could simply just enter what you're looking for plus filetype:pdf in google and achieve the same results.

Having trouble coming up with what to cook for dinner tonight? Maybe SuperCook can help.

SuperCook is a search engine designed to find recipes based on the ingredients you have in your kitchen. On the site you enter what you have, and then SuperCook will tell you what you can make. Recipes are divided by Starters, Entrees, and Desserts and list any additional items you might need beside their name so you don't waste time reading an entire recipe only to find you're missing a key ingredient. As you enter items the site starts to list "Recommended items" that will open the doors to more dishes. if you're headed out to the store anyway, SuperCook can also give you a recommended shopping list of items that will work well with what you have at home.

We tried the site out, and were a little let down. We put in two ingredients: cheddar cheese, and green beans. The site immediately returned 2000 recipes we could make with those two ingredients but most of them called for BLACK beans rather than green ones which isn't exactly the same thing. Somehow we think nachos with green beans wouldn't be all that tasty.

The site did come back with some good results for other searches, and if we had those black beans we were given tons of recipes that we might have otherwise not thought of. It's definitely not perfect, but it could be a good place to start if you're looking to be adventurous in the kitchen.

We know you might find this hard to believe, but Google is not the only search engine out there. No really. There are others. You might even have heard of a few, like Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, and even the oldie, but goody AltaVista.

SearchBoth is a website that lets you search multiple sites at once. But unlike Dogpile, SearchBoth doesn't spit out all the results in a single stream. Instead, you can compare your results side by side.

As you might guess from the search engine's name, you used to have access to just two sites: Google and Yahoo!. This month the company added support for more services, including all those listed above and MetaCrawler, LookSmart and WebCrawler to boot. There's also a new travel search feature that lets you compares results from several top travel sites and a yellowpages v. superpages online phone book faceoff.

[via Mobility Site]

Web sites that let you access multiple search engines are nothing new. Dogpile and similar services have been around for years.

But a couple of new multi-site search engines are making the search process prettier, if not more useful. Sputtr and Symbaloo let you search one site at a time, but from a central location. The idea is that you'll bookmark one of these sites, and then you'll never have to visit Google, Yahoo!, or any other search engine again. Sort of.

With Sputtr, you enter your search term in the box, then click the icon for the search engine or service (like eBay, YouTube, or StumbleUpond) that you want to search. Your result will pop up in the same window, or in a new window if you adjust your settings. You can customize the buttons available on the main page by selecting from dozens of additional search engines. But you cannot currently add your own sites.

It's no secret that we've got a soft spot right in the middle of our chest for Mahalo. The company's founder, Jason Calacanis, also founded Weblogs, Inc and, having worked under his absolutely boundless energy, we can say first-hand that he's a force to be reckoned with. Apparently the New York times thinks so as well.

The Sunday edition of the New York Times included this great article on the small change left over in the search space outside of Google. Well, small change if you can call a 1 billion dollar market cap "small change". According to one of the experts the NYT spoke with, "1 percent of the 7.3 billion searches performed in the United States in March, multiplied by 12 cents in advertising revenue per search, would yield annualized revenue of $105 million. Assuming a market cap that is 10 times revenue, his arithmetic leads to a billion-dollar company."

We're keeping a close eye on Mahalo, and the rest of the search market that exists outside the Google-sphere.

When human-powered search engine Mahalo launched in alpha earlier this month, comparisons to Google Search were inevitable. In reality, Mahalo is to Google like pie is to brussels sprouts. They're both food, but pie is much more fun to eat.

Mahalo is the brainchild of uber-entreprenuer Jason Calacanis (the founder of Weblogs, Inc. and, by extension, this blog) and could position itself to become a viable alternative to the stodgy-but-familiar Google behemoth. Though it's not ready for prime time just yet, we took a walk through the site and snagged a few screen shots along the way.

QueryCAT has a new take on the search engine. Rather than scanning the web for a answers to your queries, the search engine looks specifically at Frequently Asked Question pages.

When it works well, you get a pretty decent response to your question listed right on the front page, no click-through necessary. That's because the site has found a direct match to your question and displayed the answer. For example, if you ask "What is Thunderbird?" You will find that "Thunderbird is a free, open-source email client based on the Mozilla code base."

But there are limitations to this system. For example, "How to dual boot Ubuntu and Windows" comes up with one irrelevant result, while the same search on Google brings up several helpful tutorials.

QueryCAT's Kevin Carey says the site currently has about 2-million questions and answers indexed, but the goal is to double or even triple that number within the next few weeks, which should result in better search results.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Once upon a time in order to find information on a person you had to put in a lot of time and hard work. You had to ask around, snoop through garbage cans, use things like binoculars and stakeouts. Things sure have changed. Now all you need is an Internet connection and a name.

Cybersnooping takes another leap forward next week when Spock -- a new search engine -- beta launches. Spock promises to be a step forward in the field of people searching/stalking. Along the same lines as Wink, Spock searches through the web and returns any information it can find on the person entered. As with most people searches, Spock checks the obvious social networks, but the aim is to go well beyond that and actually index the entire web. It seems as though Spock isn't going to be content with simply being another people search. It is planning to do what Google did for web searching, and what Amazon did for product searching. Spock's founders - Jaideep Singh and Jay Bharti -- claim that 30% of all Internet searches are people related, and that alongside Amazon and Google, Spock will complete some sort of holy trifecta of web searching. While it may be true that almost a third of web queries are people related, one has to wonder if those millions of lonely souls searching "Pamela Anderson" are really going to be satisfied with the results Spock provides.

Spock does have some interesting features however. Not least of which is the ability for users to claim their own names. By "proving" your identity, you can take hold of your results and decide, among other things, what photos will be displayed and also add additional personal information. You identify yourself by showing that you have access to a personal data source, such as a MySpace page. Clearly a flawless means of identification. Spock also allows you to import a contact list from places like Outlook, and perform searches against that list. Because, you know, that's way easier than asking them about themselves.

That sound you hear? It's the sound of a million webmasters shouting for joy. I certainly didn't see it coming, but Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google have entered an agreement to support a single, unified sitemap protocol, which webmasters can use to give all three companies' search engines a complete listing of their site's pages. Microsoft's Live Search Blog, the Yahoo! Search Blog, and Google's Webmaster Central Blog all have announcements about the unified effort, and the companies have launched sitemaps.org to promote the protocol. The protocol itself has been released under the Creative Commons license and other search engines have been invited to use it as well. Search Engine Watch has the press release.

[Via Techmeme]

Pluggd recently debuted their latest feature: HearHear technology, which allows you to search for content within podcasts. I know what you're thinking... don't PodZinger and Podscope do the same thing?

Well, sort of. Pluggd purports to offer the same features as those services - and more. HearHear will find instances of a search term, and related terms. The result of your search will be a "heat map" that is color-coded by relevance. Hovering over an area of the map will show which terms were found in that section.

Pluggd is still in beta, and HearHear is currently available for public consumption only as a demonstration. It remains to be seen whether Pluggd can deliver on all they're touting. But if they pull it off? They could be cashing in big time on the next big thing.

[Via TechCrunch]

PodZinger is a search engine that lets you search for words and phrases within podcasts and videocasts. Yes, within the actual audio. And now there's a plug-in available that adds PodZinger to the Mozilla search toolbar.

I installed the plug-in, and a-searchin' I went. PodZinger uses some speech-to-text magic that is far from perfect, but cool nonetheless. Most of the time, the "amber" it supposedly found was actually something like "and in." However, it did find two actual instances of "Georgia Podcast Network." (Obviously I'm going to search for my name and the web site I run... what else would I search for?)

Even though speech-to-text technology is still in the very early stages, PodZinger is definitely a service to keep an eye on. This is the direction in which the web will be heading in coming years.

(Thanks, Jasmine!)