Esotropiart

Wow, thank my lucky stars! I just discovered something very cool about search engines. There is actually a use to their "cached version" feature. I had noticed before that search engines like Google and Yahoo have a link to older versions of sites alongside most search results. Before just a few minutes ago, however, I couldn't think of any reason why that would be useful.

About a half-hour ago, I accidentally saved my latest blog entry over the top of an older file and mindlessly uploaded the overwritten file to my web server. That means that both the file on my computer and the one on my web site were overwritten, and the older blog entry was effectively lost. I began to brainstorm of ways to restore the older file and couldn't think of any. I did have a backup plan, so wasn't to the panicking stage yet (not that the content of my blog entries amount to much importance, but think of all those faithful viewers who wouldn't sleep that night, knowing they had missed something!). There are two computers I use to work on my web site, and I could go to the other computer to restore the file. However, something came to mind in the meantime.

I suddenly realized I could check some search engines for a cached version of my site, and copy the overwritten text from there. And it worked, "Yahoo!" Speaking of search engines, what are your opinions, anyone who might be reading? I remember when Excite, Webcrawler and Lycos were the most used in my little world. Then all-of-a-sudden I found out about several others, including Alta Vista, Yahoo, Dogpile and Mamma. After that, Google gained universal popularity and now seems to be the default search engine for everyone in the world, including me. I am actually quite a fan of Google, and I am enthralled with all their additional technologies. Most recently, I have discovered Ask.com to be quite an effective search engine.

I'm beginning to wonder why Google is so popular. In reality, I think I have just influenced by the majority, rather than looking to see which actually finds the results I want. Most of the time I don't actually find what I'm looking for on Google. In order to find something, you have to type out an extremely advanced search string, something I haven't mastered. I would prefer to find a search engine that actually looks for sensible English patterns like sentences or concepts. I guess AI (Artificial Intelligence) simply hasn't got there yet. I think this is somewhat the goal of Ask.com, a search engine that allows you to type questions in English, often returning results that actually relate to the question, rather than weighing results by how many times each word of your sentence appears in the text (a mostly useless method). It would be nice if some of the other engines, including Google would follow suit and generate more intelligent results.

As far as crawling the web, I have found that Yahoo's bots seems to crawl far faster than Google's. Maybe it is different for each domain, but Yahoo caches Esotropiart far faster than Google. Eso appeared on Yahoo long before Google even knew of its existence. In fact, all Google had for the longest time was an extremely early cached version of my site as it appeared on the student web server where I started the project in late 2004. It was due to Yahoo's fast crawling speed that I was able to restore my lost blog entry. Google also had a cached version of my site, but it was from several days before the blog entry was written. In these modern, competitive times, I'm once again learning to look outside Google for my searching needs. Unfortunately, I just don't know where to look. If anyone has any suggestions, like which is your favorite engine, or explain how you use different ones for different purposes, or how to use effective search strings to find what you are looking for, let me know by leaving a descriptive comment.