do you have evidence to support this position? they certainly weren't the only search engine with a cute, zany name. trying to recall exactly why i switched. i

do you have evidence to support this position? they certainly weren't the only search engine with a cute, zany name. trying to recall exactly why i switched. i don't entirely recall, but i remember that at the time i used a rotation of multiple engines, usually starting with metacrawler and then branching to other engines that didn't index. after switching to google, that rotation immediately ended. my recollection is that results really were that much better. i certainly appreciated google's design minimalism, but it certainly wasn't make-or-break, seeing as i was willing to go through multiple sites on every search. i wouldn't have cared about what you termed 'tricking the user', which feels like a skewed characterization. i just interpreted such things as 'no results', the same way i do now. that said, i can't really support my position either. i'm curious if anyone has tried to measure the quality of search over time.. you always see a lot of opinions about it here and elsewhere but it seems very much non-obvious to me, and hugely multivariate.