Yandex – an alternative to Google

We’ve seen in recent months – in fact in recent years – that Google really isn’t interested in the search process. Rather than developing and improving their offering they have in fact been reducing it. We lost the tilde symbol ( ) to search for synonyms and more recently the opportunity to filter by pages that you have or have not visited has gone, as has the reading level option. That’s just a small sample, there are many more. It’s clear that Google doesn’t want us to search, it wants to know best, and give us exactly what IT thinks we need, irrespective of our own search criteria. The result is that Google has brought itself back in line with other search engines, and there are fewer reasons to consider using it above and beyond the other engines out there. It’s true that it does have a large database of pages, but since most searchers are not going to look further than the first 20 or so results, I have to wonder just how important that is.