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search 'miserable failure' resulted first in the official Whitehouse biography of George W. Bush, followed by the Jimmy Carter biography. While Google, for the most part, did away with this annoyance, Google Bombing is an excellent example of this company's popularity acting contrary to its purpose - specifically, one minority user group was able to destroy the legitimacy of searches for all other Google users. Although this particular problem was resolved, it is palpable that more issues of like nature will result from the expansive reach of the Google web community.

In summarization of the above, Google's popularity makes the search engine comprehensive and high-functioning, but less useful and more vulnerable to manipulation. Google's popularity certainly allows for research into the popular and provides a substantial monetary base for the company to innovate. But popularity also creates a loyalty to sponsors which interrupts the flow of internet browsing. Additionally, the pertinence of results is trumped by popularity, especially problematic when combined with manipulation.

It is based on this premise that less popular search engines become quite viable as alternatives to Google. Many of the other search engines produce a comparable listing of the results, but provide tools which focus web browsing to more relevant matches. What similar tools Google has are sacrificed to their sponsors.

Following is a list of nine alternative search engines along with a short evaluation of each.

The Ask search engine (www.ask.com) has a user friendly interface that provides numerous search refinement and expansion suggestions on the left, and a slew of other results posted at right, including multimedia results, encyclopedia and dictionary results, news results, and more. Sponsored results are posted above and below the web listing, but do little to distract from browsing. To its hurt, however, the Ask search engine does produce fewer results than Google, for instance on a search for the term 'books,' Ask matched 343,340,000 results while Google matched about 726,000,000. Likewise, during a search for the term 'trumpet,' Ask provided 5,970,000 results while Google showed about 19,200,000.

AltaVista (www.altavista.com) is similar in design to Google, with sponsors to the side. Additional sponsorship appears above and below the search results. Unfortunately, there is no 'related search' option. In fact, at face value AltaVista is a poor alternative to Google. But this otherwise

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