Yes, at last, after 8 years I have left the world of Google. The plug-in is going from my browser and I have installed snap in its place. It has good features, is slick, returns quality results, allows you to junk results and gives you a preview of pages before visiting them. What’s more it is founded byt he guy that invented pay-per-click. Loving IT.
Let’s see how long Google does stay off my desktop and how long before snap gets polluted as Google searches have with advertising.
I have now been using Snap for 2 weeks. The quality of the searches is really very good. The time to search results is slightly slower.
I like the preview pane that gives a view of a site before cliking through. This avoids clicking through and then back again or between tabs if the result isn’t what the user is looking for.
Snap is VC-backed and adverstising driven. It is not clear which of the results are advertising driven. With Google this is more apparent. I must say that my preference is to find a version that has no advertising or where the advertising profits are given to charity!
Will I go back? Not yet.
I have finally gone back to Google until I have time to look for another alternative – Snap is too slow and uses a system of advertising that does not allow one to easily see which results are paid for.
There is no virtuous circle involved between search and advertising – we search to find authentic results and although the results page is a smart place to put adverts there is no benefit to the search from having the adverts.
Long-live the search engine that just does a great job of search.