I recently saw a little bit of hype about a new search engine called WbSrch Web Search and decided to take a look at it. It's a free text search engine (like Google and Bing - type in what ever you want and it'll search on it) and it's similar to DuckDuckGo in that it doesn't track you. It comes in 25 different language flavours, and it does its own internet trawl for new sites to include - it's not using a subset of Google search.
And... that's about all that I can say which is positive. Search functionality is limited to typing in some words and I quote "There's nothing fancy you can do - no boolean operators or the like." There is no image search, video, news - just standard webpages. And not that many of those either - a search on 'library' returned 250 results. That's it. Several other searches that I ran gave no results at all, so it's still at a very early stage of trawling the net. The SERPs were awful to look at - it was like something back in the 1990s.
One thing that particularly struck me was their rudeness and arrogance. Try a few of these quotes, taken from their FAQ. "If you're in a hurry, we're sorry. Improvement takes time." "What if I look up my domain and find that my site was wrongly excluded from the index? Tough cookie. There is no appeal or review process." "we don't do social media."
They might be trying to be all hip and devil may care, but to be honest, they just look rude, unhelpful and very unprofessional. I really wouldn't recommend them, and I suspect that within six months they'll be dead. Which will be no particular loss.
Thank you for the useful feedback.
Posted by: Jason Champion | May 30, 2014 at 12:16 AM
I know what you mean...but I didn't find their approach "rude", as such, honest and blunt and trying to stick one in the eye to all the other search engines that smarm up to us with their FAQs.
But if it doesn't get to the info you want, they will fail regardless of how snarky they are or how hip...
Posted by: David Bradley | June 03, 2014 at 08:43 AM
Ironically, my first attempt at a search after reading their FAQ gave a 500 server error! Second attempt worked, and my sciencebase site is in there ;-)
Posted by: David Bradley | June 03, 2014 at 08:46 AM