According to an article in Database Pipeline, The Web’s Biggest search engine is claiming that it searches more websites than any other search engine including Google. The Web’s Biggest uses the Whois database to conduct its searches and the Whois database contains all of the registered Internet domain names. According to The Web’s Biggest, “Other search engines missed from a third to more than half of the Web sites [included] in the Web’s Biggest search results,” because they are not using the Whois database.
Adam Radly, Web’s Biggest spokesman, said its traffic presents an accurate compilation of the popularity of a Web site. “The search engine’s approach also enables it to qualify as the biggest “wiki,” the company added.
The Web’s Biggest goes on to say that it searches nearly all websites in English, while other search engines miss many sites because they rely on hyperlinks and manual submissions in their searches. As for Google, The Web’s Biggest won’t have this edge for long, though. Last month Google applied to become an ICANN official registrar in order to get access to the Whois database for presumably this reason among others.
So, the real question is not only who is the biggest, but who is the best search engine. When I go to The Web’s Biggest search engine and type in my usual search for “funny t-shirts” and hit the Return key, the first 5 results are for an astrology site, a Christian dating site and 3 other Christian sites. In the next level of results under the heading “Search results by relevancy” are such listings as ‘cash is god,’ ‘av-god.com,’ and 16 other websites that mention ‘God’ in their titles. In this supposedly relevant search area there are no results for funny t-shirts at all. I then notice that the search had defaulted to “God” on a separate page and I needed to retype my search and try again.
Under the search box are buttons to let you choose if you’d like to search WebsBiggest, Google, Yahoo, TopSites, EditorsChoice, LookSmart, YellowPages or All. If you input “funny t-shirts” and click All, once again the search box defaults to ‘God’ and Christian search results appear. If you select one of the other choices, then you do get relevant results, which begs the question of why not just use one of the other search engines for your searches since the results are far more relevant? Also, when doing a search on The Web’s Biggest, one will notice that there are what appear to be sponsored advertisements on top of the listing, though nowhere are they marked as such. There are some sponsored results marked as such on the right panel, but the top three results have nothing to indicate to the public that these are advertisements as opposed to organic listings.
The Web’s Biggest may have laid claim to being the biggest search engine for now, but they have many miles to go before they can claim to be the best. As a search engine, if you’ve crawled millions of websites but don’t know how to serve up relevant results then what good are you? If The Web’s Biggest is to succeed, they will need to focus a little less of the biggest and a little more on the best aspect of being a respectable search engine.
