IceRocket to Offer Google Alternative

our anonymous link-exchanging friend/ sends “us info about a new search tool, IceRocket that “that aims to take over where Google leaves off,” according to this story from CNET.com. What makes it different is more powerful image searching and an email-based service that can be used on handhelds and other mobile devices. You can give it a test-drive here.

August 6, 2004 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. Cyberpunk Librarian says:
    August 7, 2004 at 12:13 am

    Not bad, but…

    Is this owned or subsidized by Google in any way? Because their layout is pretty much the same as Google. IceRocket image search looks almost exactly like Google Images. I know that immitation is a sincere form of flattery, but in the real world it can get you sued real quick. Especially by a company with an IPO and a trademark to protect.

    That said, I’m pretty impressed. I’ll give it several runs over the next few days and search the same stuff with it when I use Google. It doesn’t have the features that Google does, especially the image search. Still, it is new, so they may come along later. I don’t know though. It’d take a lot to drag me away from Google. I can’t find everything with Google, but I usually come close.

    Reply
  2. Cyberpunk Librarian says:
    August 8, 2004 at 2:03 am

    Not as good….

    I tried doing a couple searches on IceRocket and Google Images to kinda compare notes on what it comes up with. To start, I looked for one of my all time favourite movies. Unfortunately (well, maybe not so unfortunate depending on how you look at it) the title can also bring up some unintended results. See I dig heavily on Benicio Del Toro and Jason Statham. You can find them both in the Guy Ritchie film Snatch. Obviously a film with that title is gonna give you some other interesting things to look at when you do a Google search. Which is why it’s one of my favourite items to search for; you can check context sensitivity with it.

    Result? IceRocket came up with a paltry 39 image hits for Snatch, and that includes the pornographic results. Google tanked in at 39,700. Now quantity isn’t always quality, but you’re damn sure gonna have more choices when a search returns almost 1018 times the hits than another engine. However, there is a caveat. While Google had plenty of porn in those results, the 39 results returned with IceRocket were almost all exclusively related to the movie and not porn. I have no idea if that was intentional or not, but it is interesting.

    Reply

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