With Yahoo! unveiling its new search engine this week, CNet thinks the search wars are about to get personal. The article discusses the fact that people are generally not loyal to one search engine, and how the major players are maneuvering to secure that loyalty; one of the people quoted says, “Everyone thinks there’s this incredible loyalty to Web search engines, but in fact there really isn’t.”
It seems to me the term “loyalty” is misused here. Sure, everyone has a favorite search engine (can you tell from reading this blog thatGoogle is mine?), but in order to be a successful searcher, you have to be disloyal, to use the language of the article. Good researchers know that one search engine won’t find everything on the Internet, and several tools should be utilized for the most effective search. In other words, bravo for Yahoo!, or any other search engine, for that matter — if they can help me find things that Google can’t, more power to ’em.