A Canadian Search Engine
by 
Mark Evans on September 17th, 2006
Looking for a Google alternative? Want something with more of a Canadian focus? You may want to wander over to SearchEngine.ca, which is trying to carve out a niche in the market by offering the ability to search the Web, news, video, audio, blogs and shopping sites. You can also search using a single search engine such as Google, Yahoo, Altavista (who uses that anymore?), MSN and others - or just do a .ca search. If you just want a seach engined focused on Canadian sites, check out Canuckster, CanTrek, which appears to be for sale, Canada on the Web (which is focused on business sites) and CanadaSpace. Another site for Canadian blogs is Canadian Blogs.net. Update: For local search, there’s redToronto.com for Toronto.
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POSTED IN: Google
2 opinions for A Canadian Search Engine
Sep 17, 2006 at 10:35 pm
SearchEngine.ca doesn’t seem like a Google alternative per se…its default search engine is Google, so you’re just getting the same results as you would using Google.ca. And the other options are just an interface to get search results from other search engines (and the “.ca results only” option doesn’t work on any of those other ones).
Someone I know online has put together Acrosscan.ca, which is a Canadian search engine that maintains its own database. There, if you search for “web 2.0″ the results will include some Canadian .com (like michaelmcderment.com and sitepronews.com) that Google.ca wouldn’t recognize as Canadian sites just because they’re hosted south of the border.
Sep 18, 2006 at 7:59 pm
SearchEngine.ca was created to basically be a ‘all in one’ type search engine where the aim is to provide you with numerous search options across a fairly broad spectrum of search types. Is it an alternative to Google? That really depends on what kind of alternative you’re looking for. If you want to search YouTube videos, Amazon.ca shopping, .ca-only web search etc. etc. then SearchEngine.ca is a pretty good spot to do all of those things in one place. What we found was that there was no perfect Canadian search engine, or perfect ‘true’ Canadian search. The reality is, the only search that will return 100% Canadian results is to do a ‘.ca only’ search which SearchEngine offers with an easy one-click, or to run your own database/crawl for Canada. Of course, the problem with ‘.ca only’ is that while you’ll get 100% Canadian results, you’ll be missing some of the .com/.net etc. that are Canadian. The problem with running your own DB/crawl is that unless you have a lot of resources to devote to this, chances are your database is going to be out of date pretty quickly. For example, we launched Gadget.ca in April and but a search for ‘gadget.ca’ on Acrosscan.ca turns up no links to the site, which would indicate the database is a little stale. That’s not a knock on Acrosscan because there is value in a human-vetted index, it just underscores how there really is no perfect ‘Canadian’ search. Above all else, SearchEngine.ca is about giving the user options.
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