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Remember the first time someone said to you, “Why not just Google it?” Me neither, but there’s a reason more people use Google for their web searches than any other. Here are 7 search engines that fail at being as good as Google.

1. Yahoo.com
Yahoo! has this super annoying predictive text. They call it “search assist” and can be turned off at any time. Type in ‘American’ and of course, the first ‘predictions’ that come up are “American Idol”, “American Airlines”, “American Express”, “American Idol Results”, and “American Eagle”. I can’t help but wonder if these choices are REALLY the most searched for items, or if they are the ones with the most sponsorship paid into Yahoo!. And see what happens when you just put the letter ‘F’ in there! The thing that people want to find the most that starts with ‘F’ is “Facebook”? And surprisingly, put in the letter ‘Y’ and “Youtube” comes before “Yahoo”. Weird. Put in just the letter ‘O’ and the first prediction is not “Oprah” but “Orkut”. What is Orkut.com you say? Why only the top social site in Brazil and India!

2. MSN or is it MSN.Live or Live Search?
Pick a name already. Oh, and be sure to have “Microsoft” way at the bottom of your page so as not to let people know who’s running their search engine. Also, I wanted to do a web search, but ended up looking at Money, Music, and Movies and got totally distracted. At least the search bar is centrally located. And above that is the date in a clickable link! Where does it lead? Why to a web search with the first result being “This day in history” brought to you by Encarta! You know, the people who hate Wikipedia! Of course, they ask you: “Was this helpful?” No.

3. Ask.com
When it comes to simplicity Ask.com is good and it’s predictive text only pops up after the second letter! My only question is, “What happened to Jeeves?” Back in the day, you could ask him just about anything, and he was there to help you. Well, he’s gone and so are your previous searches with “Askeraser”, because everyone knows that you don’t want anybody knowing about all the naughty stuff you’ve been searching for! Ask.com is nice enough to let you add skins, which they believe will add to your searching experience. Maybe instead have ALL the categories to search right there instead of a drop down with three (?) more choices.

4. AOL.com
AOL exists only in our distant memories as this free CD Rom that used to come free in the mail. Currently, it is a search engine website only for the people that still use their AOL email account. Oh, those poor people. They still believe that AOL is the internet. So the main page is a mish-mash of wacky stories and entertainment headlines. Note the high number of the words “hot” and “cool” and “wildest” to draw in the type of people that still use AOL. Ugh.

5. Altavista.com
You can use Altavista all you want, their specialty is international specified searches, but it’s no Google. Plus, what Altavista won’t tell you is that: It’s really Yahoo! It’s basically for people who refuse to use Yahoo, unfortunately they won’t ever figure it out, and when they do, it’s too late. For some reason, the only “feature” on the main page is Babel Fish Translation (also bought out by Yahoo!) as if that’s a feature. What happens when you translate ‘Alta’ and ‘Vista’ as two separate words in Babel Fish? You get “discharge” and “view” which really means: “Look and Spew”. No, really.

6. Dogpile.com
Dogpile is famed for being a metasearch engine using multiple search engines. If you have used it, you will notice that you have to scroll past the first screen to get past ALL the sponsored links. Or is that page 3? Sure, you have the help of Google, but again, it’s not worth knowing that someone is just trying to sell you something. Maybe if they called it Adpile or Commercialpile it would make more sense. Put “Love” into Dogpile, something that you would think would be priceless and not be bought, but sadly there plenty of sponsored links to muddle through.

7. Excite.com
If you are one of the unfortunate people who uses Excite, well you must stop. They are proud to have a huge banner ad right under the top title banner. It’s like they’re saying “this ad will excite you!” Also, they’re really nice enough to give you ANOTHER search box at the bottom of the page, but that one is flanked by another ad! Ecxite tries to be iGoogle, but it’s not. You can opt for the only half as cluttered “Excite lite” which is an attempt to control what you see, but you cannot opt out of seeing their banner ads. Sorry Excite, you are boring.