Don’t Google, use Answers.com

February 4, 2005: The first time I told someone to use Answers.com instead of Google.

I’ve been using Atomica, and then GuruNet, for years — but I just noticed this past week that their Answers.com website now has all their formerly for-pay content available for free. After a quick visit to the old subscribers-only site, I’ve discovered that they are switching to a advertising supported model. Now, I don’t know if this will work for them or not (it certainly is working for Google), but it’s certainly going to work for you!

Answers.com is to the search for information as Google is to the search for webpages. I mean, I know Google’s been trying to move towards the information-centric model, but try this as an example: search for “Parallel Port” or “USB” on each of them, and see which one you would use when you were trying to understand what the term meant. Answers.com has a full reference library built in, and the smarts to know which books are most likely to have the information you want.

The bottom line is this: When you have a question, Answers.com has the answer, but on Google, you’ll get (at best) a link to the answer. [ ] Seriously. Another example (on the extreme edge, I honestly did this search thinking Google would win): search for GeoShell … you’ll get a link to the geoshell homepage, where there are approximately 2 lines describing GeoShell along with links to the “Users Guide” and a mysterious “Desktops Section” (which is actually where we hide the screenshots). Do the same search on Answers.com and you’ll get a Wikipedia article that describes GeoShell, what it does, and it’s history, along with a link to the homepage. And by the way, I do mean you get teh article back, not a link to it. Very nice.

Incidentally, when they come up empty, they always send you to Google, and in this case the downloadable application (available for Mac or Windows) scores bonus points, because it just goes ahead and brings up the Google results. Oh, and there’s a Firefox search plugin available as well.

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