2001 Search Engine Watch Awards

By Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch, Feb 6, 2002
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2001 Search Engine Watch Awards

By Danny Sullivan, Editor
 SearchEngineWatch.com, Feb. 6, 2002

The Search Engine Watch Awards recognize outstanding achievements in web searching. The winners for accomplishments during 2001 are below:

Outstanding Search Service
Winner: Google
Honorable Mention: AllTheWeb

Best Meta Search Engine
Winner: Vivisimo

Best News Search Engine
 Winner: Yahoo News
Honorable Mentions:
AllTheWeb News, AltaVista News, & RocketNews

Best Image Search Engine
 Winner: Google Images

Best Design
Winner: Google

Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine
Winner: Google
Honorable Mention: Zeal

Best Paid Placement Service
Winner: Overture
 Honorable Mentions: Google & Espotting

Best Paid Inclusion Service
Winner: Inktomi

Best Search Feature
Winners:
Google Toolbar & Cached Links
 Honorable Mention:
Vivisimo Autocategorization

Best Specialty Search Engine
 Winner: Scirus
Honorable Mention: Google Groups

Hall Of Fame
Inducted: AltaVista & The Open Directory

How The Winners Were Selected

In January 2002, readers of Search Engine Watch's various newsletters were invited to vote on their favorite services in different categories. An example of the voting form can be found here.

The votes and suggestions were used by Search Engine Watch editor Danny Sullivan and associate editor Chris Sherman in making the final decisions about award winners. More details are below about each of the award categories and winners.

Outstanding Search Service

This category recognizes outstanding performance in helping Internet users locate general information from across the World Wide Web.

Winner: Google

Last year's winner Google was again the clear choice for being named the Outstanding Search Service of 2001. The company not only maintained its widely-praised high relevancy, but it also unveiled a dizzying array of new features and services.

In 2001, Google became the first major search engine to go beyond indexing only HTML and text documents, first adding support for PDF files and then many other document types, such as Word documents. This made important content previously "invisible" to searchers available for the first time.

Coverage of the web was also increased, with Google breaking first the 1 billion document barrier and then pushing through to 1.5 billion documents indexed, by the end of the year -- well beyond its nearest major competitors.

Google resurrected and greatly improved the former DejaNews service, breathing new live into newsgroup searching. It also unveiled an image search service and a catalog search service.

These are just some of the many reasons that Google stood out to be selected as an editors' choice. It was also the clear winner among Search Engine Watch readers. Of the 568 valid votes for this category, 66 percent were for Google.

Why do people like Google? Consistently, comments praised that it was accurate, fast, comprehensive, easy to use and that ads were clearly identified and not intrusive. Here are just four of nearly 200 comments received about Google, as part of the voting:

  • Relevancy, relevancy, relevancy! Indexed PDF files! Accurate image search! Google Groups! No fees to submit! To sum up: my girlfriend, who knows NOTHING about computers, tried Google ONCE (it took me months to get her to try, instead of her AltaVista habit) - now not only does she exclusively use Google but tells all of her friends to, as well. When was the last time a search engine provoked true word-of-mouth advertising?
  • Consistently gives good results despite all the phenomenal growth in coverage and the addition of special features. It remains easy to use in a simple search and uncluttered visually.
  • I usually find what I need in the first 10 results. I teach students (middle school) to use the images and directory features. Generally, it is plain and simple, no advertising, and easy to use with great results.
  • The service is clean, no pop up ads or pop unders, ease of navigation, sponsored sites are listed clearly, and the listings are up to date.

Honorable Mention: AllTheWeb (FAST)

AllTheWeb, which is operated by FAST, came a long way in 2001. Relevancy improvements, better spam filtering, "clustering" of results so that no one site can crowd others out of the top results are all some of the things that helped turn AllTheWeb into an impressive search resource, one worthy of an honorable mention. The company is also doing interesting work in trying to automatically suggest non-HTML content when relevant, such as multimedia files or images. In the voting, AllTheWeb was the second most popular choice after Google, gaining 12 percent of the vote.

Other Notable Results

AltaVista earned 7 percent of the vote, followed by Yahoo with 4 percent. All others earned 2 percent or less.

Best Meta Search Engine

This category recognizes outstanding performance in helping Internet users "meta search" or gather results from many web search engines by using one single service. For examples, see the Metacrawlers area within Search Engine Watch.

Winner: Vivisimo

Vivisimo is a meta search engine that automatically categorizes results into various topics. Selecting a topic presents results relevant to that particular area, and it's possible to drill down through several layers of categorization. It's a feature that has won over some users, yet those who don't like it can still find traditional meta search results. Those results are also clear of paid links. While intended to be a demo of Vivisimo's autocategorization technology, the site has evolved into one of the top meta search choices available today.

Comments On Voting

The voting form for the Search Engine Watch Awards opened on January 7, 2001 and was publicized to Search Engine Watch readers. Around mid-day on January 9, there was a significant change in the voting patterns. Suddenly, huge numbers of votes in this category came in for the popular meta search engines of MetaCrawler, Dogpile and Mamma. This continued until the voting form was closed early on January 11.

InfoSpace, which owns MetaCrawler and Dogpile, had asked permission to link to the voting form. This was given and undoubtedly caused the spike for those services. No link from the Mamma web site could be found, but the shift in voting was so out of the ordinary that some promotion of the voting page to Mamma users must have happened.

The votes in question ultimately were not counted for several reasons. For one, they skewed the results. It was common for fans of MetaCrawler, Dogpile or Mamma to vote for them in all categories, not just the meta search category, using the "write in" option.

Another concern was that these votes were not reflective of the Search Engine Watch readership. Instead, it was more reflective of the overall popularity of these services, which is not the same as providing the feedback needed to determine if the services deserve to be award winners.

Excluding the votes wasn't an easy decision, but it seemed the best course of action. It was the same decision made last year, when this happened. Next year, we'll probably look at a new way of accepting votes so that the voices of Search Engine Watch readers are not at risk of being drowned out.

Please understand that there's no suggestion of wrongdoing by MetaCrawler, Dogpile or Mamma. InfoSpace did ask for permission before linking. As for Mamma, spot checks on the votes received found them to be from real human beings who use Mamma.

It's important to remember that the Search Engine Watch Awards are not given out in response to voting, unless specifically noted in a particular category. Online voting is difficult to police, which is one reason why we are hesitant to use it. More importantly, the editors of Search Engine Watch want to give out the awards based on merit. Voting helps us in our decisions but it does not decide for us, in most categories.

FYI, of the 333 valid votes in this category, the breakdown was like this:

  • Dogpile: 25%
  • MetaCrawler: 15%
  • Vivisimo: 14%
  • Ixquick: 12%
  • Mamma: 9%
  • SurfWax: 9%
  • Copernic: 5%

All others earned 4 percent or less. As you can see, Dogpile was the most popular choice even among Search Engine Watch readers and indeed was one of last year's winners, in this category. However, we decided this year that no meta search engine would be eligible to win if it did not clearly identify paid listings among its results. Paid listings are not bad, but they should be identified as such.

That decision excludes Dogpile, as well as last year's other winner, Ixquick. It also excludes MetaCrawler and Mamma. We consider this lack of delineation a major problem, and the article below explains the issues more:

Meta Search Or Meta Ads?
SearchEngineWatch, May 23, 2000

There is no doubt that the services excluded are popular with many web surfers. If you use them and like them as they are, that's great. However, you might not realize that they are delivering up ads to you. By taking more control of these tools, as explained in the article above, you might receive more editorial content and perhaps get better satisfaction with your results.

Also take a look at the two services at the bottom of the list above, SurfWax and Copernic, along with Vivisimo. SurfWax does include paid listings from Excite (which is powered by Overture), but not to the extent that the other meta search engines named do. Copernic is a popular and free meta search software package, which doesn't appear to query paid listings services at all.

Best News Search Engine

This category recognizes outstanding performance in helping Internet users locate news from across the web. For examples, see the News Search Engines area within Search Engine Watch.

Winner: Yahoo News

Yahoo News provides headlines from major wire services as well as links to news stories from across the web. Of all the services on the voting form, it is the only one that uses human beings in a major way to gather and organize its news content. It was the favorite with readers, who gave Yahoo News 21 percent of the 347 valid votes received. We went with their decision in choosing Yahoo News as winner.

Honorable Mentions:
 AllTheWeb News, AltaVista News, RocketNews

AllTheWeb introduced a crawler-based news service late in 2001, but it already seems to have won over Search Engine Watch readers. It came in just barely behind Yahoo News, with 20 percent of the votes cast. We considered making it a joint winner with Yahoo News but decided that it hadn't run long enough in 2001 for that. However, it does warrant an honorable mention, for being an outstanding new news resource.

RocketNews was another excellent new news resource that came on to the scene in 2001. It was near the bottom of the list in the voting, pulling only 4 percent. However, its quality is such that we decided it should be recognized with an honorable mention.

Finally, AltaVista News is both a new and an old news resource. It's new in that this dedicated search area for news at AltaVista didn't exist until 2001. It's old in that it is powered by news search provider Moreover, last year's "Specialty Search" winner.

AltaVista News has actually been a better place to get news search results than at Moreover itself, given that Moreover has pulled away from being a news destination site in preference to powering its partners. AltaVista News is an excellent place to locate news content from across the web and is recognized with an honorable mention.

FYI, Moreover came in fourth in the online voting, with 15 percent of the votes cast. AltaVista News came next, with 10 percent of the votes.

Other Notable Results

Google News came in third in the voting, with 17 percent. However, the inability to keyword search across news content kept it out of the running for an award. Daypop came in last in the online voting, with only 3 percent of the votes cast. However, we think this site is worthy of attention, especially for the ability to search for news via weblogs.

Best Image Search Engine

This category recognizes outstanding performance in helping Internet users locate images from across the web.

Winner: Google Images

Launched in 2001, Google Images quickly drew praise by those seeking pictures from across the web. We relied on reader opinion in selecting it as a winner, and that opinion was strong. Google pulled 68 percent of the 435 valid votes cast. In contrast, AllTheWeb Images came second with only 16 percent of the vote, followed by AltaVista Images at 15 percent. We didn't feel these figures were high enough to warrant an honorable mention for AllTheWeb or AltaVista. However, they both also offer good image search engines that users may wish to consider.

Best Design

This category recognizes the web-wide search engine deemed to have the most pleasing design.

Winner: Google

Once again, we were heavily influenced by our readers.
And once again, they came out for Google. Of the 528 valid votes received, 55 percent liked Google's design. Or, perhaps it is lack of design. Voters said over and over again that they like the fact that Google is "clean and simple." It's actually unfair to call this a lack of design. Instead, the company has purposely cultivated a clean and simple look, which is one of the hallmarks of its success with users.

Other Notable Results

AllTheWeb came behind Google with 12 percent of the vote, followed by AltaVista with 8 percent, Yahoo with 5 percent and MSN Search with 3 percent. All others were 2 percent or less.

Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine

The idea behind this category is to allow readers to vote for the search engine, either human-powered or crawler-based, that they felt sent them the most traffic. In particular, the category is meant to recognize the search engine sending the most "free" traffic to webmasters, especially without them having to spend massive amounts of time on optimization efforts. The category didn't explicitly say this, but from comments received, this did seem to be understood by many of those voting.

Winner: Google

We went with our readers here. Google gained 52 percent of the 326 valid votes received in the category. Comments often stressed that a big plus was that Google seemed to get many of their pages. "Don't need to submit URL to them. They will find you," said one person. "Indexes all of my sites and quickly too," said another. "It finds sites on its own, crawls the pages, and updates its database at least once a month. I also like the fact that Google works hard to maintain relevance in its search results, even if that means upsetting cloakers, multiple-domain spammers, SEO consultants who use invisible crosslinks between sites to boost PageRank for their clients, and other people who give search engine optimization a bad name," said a third.

Honorable Mention: Zeal

Zeal wasn't on the nomination list, but in retrospect, it should have been. Zeal is the volunteer-run directory that LookSmart acquired in Sept. 2000. In mid-2001, LookSmart overhauled the guide and integrated its listings into the information that LookSmart distributes to its partners, such as MSN Search.

As a result, people with non-commercial content had a new -- and free -- route to getting listed and obtaining traffic. The commitment to Zeal especially deserves recognition during a year when most other search engine developments aimed at webmasters involved fee-based programs. More about how Zeal listings are integrated into LookSmart can be found via the article below.

LookSmart Overhauls Submission Process
The Search Engine Report, August 2, 2001

Best Paid Placement Service

This category recognizes the best paid program providing guaranteed placement in search engine results.

Winner: Overture (GoTo)

Overture (the former GoTo) was a favorite with our readers, gaining 45 percent of 210 valid votes. We agree that the service deserves to win. This is because Overture has made it easy to get a top listing on practically every major globally-oriented search engine. It's not perfect. For example, there were complaints in 2001 over a new minimum bid requirement. However, despite this, Overture still remains an outstanding service for those with a budget. Here's a sampling of comments about the service received as part of the voting:

  • [The best], even if the 5 cent minimum sucks.
  • Excellent customer service
  • Though difficult to manage, Overture is the best at sending traffic through a guaranteed position.
  • I have tried three other paid placement services. Overture gets my vote as best for bringing in traffic, the best for ease of use, and the best overall.
  • No contest! Not thrilled with their recent overhauls -- MUCH LESS customer friendly and they appear to be trying to take over the web...but, they produce results
  • It's the best, I don't like it though!
  • In general, I find the top 3 listings too expensive for my blood -- generally bring a too low a conversion rate to justify the expenditure. However, any position in the top 20 brings decent traffic.
  • It has the best search partners. Get in the top three and you go everywhere.
  • The king of them all for cost-effective marketing. Still Espotting in Europe, though!

Honorable Mentions: Google & Espotting

Yes, Google does have paid listings, both through its self-serve "AdWords" program and through "Premium Sponsorships" text banners. Unlike some of Overture's partners, Google makes it extremely clear when something is paid for on its results page. Google came in second behind Overture, with 21 percent of the votes received. We felt it deserved an honorable mention, for the popularity of its program and the commitment in delineating paid and unpaid content.

Espotting is a UK-based paid listings provider that has built an impressive distribution base within the UK, France and Germany. The company has additional European expansion plans. Espotting pulled 10 percent of the votes received. We felt it deserved recognition for making paid placement easier in Europe.

Best Paid Inclusion Service

This category recognizes the best paid program providing inclusion in a search engine's listings. Unlike paid placement, inclusion typically does not guarantee placement. Nevertheless, it can be a valuable way for site owners to increase the representation of their sites in listings and gain traffic.

Winner: Inktomi

In this category, we went with our readers. Inktomi was clearly ahead of the competition in the voting, gaining 42 percent of 184 valid votes cast. The program provides wide distribution across a variety of Inktomi's partner sites. Here are some comments received about the program, from those who voted for it:

  • Do what they promise
  • Best of a bad bunch
  • Effective and realistic price.
  • It only takes 2 days to refresh, and the submission process is very easy. Too bad they doubled their rates.
  • Hands down the best of the bunch. I've got subscriptions for all my sites and they have more than paid off!!
  • It's more like best of the worst
  • Periodic refreshes and good placement
  • I LOVE INKTOMI. Thank goodness they have a paid inclusion service. As an SEO firm, the turnaround time is fantastic and the "in the index" guarantee saves me hours of checking. My clients all got immediate results from using this program. All the other engines should be imitating Inktomi instead of trying to surpass it. You can't beat perfection.
  • The Inktomi Paid Inclusion Service is the best around, it sends by far more traffic than all of its competitors and made it easy to incorporate our catalog into the engine.

Other Notable Results

FAST (AllTheWeb) was second in the voting with 21 percent, then came AltaVista at 20 percent. AltaVista deserves a special note because its program, for an extra fee, allows for "Listing Enhancements" to be made to a paid inclusion link. This is a nice feature and is more creative than just charging for inclusion. It would be nice to see if there was a way to offer these unbundled from inclusion. After AltaVista came LookSmart, with 17 percent of the votes.

Google got a write-in. Google doesn't offer a paid inclusion program and considers them to be unfair to site owners and bad for searchers. That's why Google got a vote, as explained by the comment with it: "The only good paid inclusion service is NOT to have one. Why institutionalize corruption?" Another person expressed similar views when leaving a comment but not selecting a program: "There is no such thing as a good paid inclusion service. They all suck."

There are pros and cons to paid inclusion, as well as paid placement, for both search engine users and site owners. For a roundup of articles about these issues, see the Pay For Placement page.

Best Search Feature

This category recognizes the best feature offered by a search engine to help users locate information. No actual features were listed on the voting form. Instead, voters were asked to "write-in" a feature they liked and comment about why it was good.

Winner: Google Toolbar & Cached Links

Of the 97 valid votes naming a specific search engine feature, the Google Toolbar received the most, 19 percent. The editors of Search Engine Watch wholeheartedly agree that the Google Toolbar is a wonderful resource that deserves to win. Both editors use it on a regular basis. More than letting you easily search at Google, the toolbar also provides nice features such as highlighting your search terms on a page, letting you search against a specific site or see the "PageRank" quality measurement of a page you are viewing.

While the Google Toolbar is great, it's not technically a feature of Google, in the traditional sense. In other words, it's not something integrated into the actual Google site. We still think it deserves to win in this category, but we also wanted to have a more traditional winner, as well.

For that, Google's "cached links" (or page caching) feature was selected. This feature lets you see a copy of the page Google has spidered. This helps you see a page that may no longer be online (for a short time, at least) and see your search terms highlighted on a page you are interested in. It remains unclear whether it is legal for Google to provide page copies like this, but legality aside, we like the feature. So do readers -- it was the second most popular feature named after the Google Toolbar, gaining 15 percent of the vote.

Honorable Mention:
Vivisimo Document Clustering (Autocategorization)

Autocategorization of search results isn't easy to do, but Vivisimo is doing it well. It's also a feature that's attracting some loyal users and one that we felt earned an honorable mention in this year's award. Vivisimo's autocategorization (they call it "document clustering") also did well in the online voting, gaining 7 percent of the vote, just behind the Google Groups newsgroup search service (9 percent) and Google's file type search support (8 percent).

Other Notable Results

This was our favorite category to review, because it was clear that there's a great diversity among the type of features that users like. This seems to suggest that the more varied features a search engine can offer, the more they're going to win loyalty among different groups of people.

There were 166 valid votes received, in all. Of these, 97 were for a specific feature at a particular search engine. The other 69 percent were for search feature in general, but no search engine was named.

Here's a rundown on votes for specific features at particular search engines that we haven't yet named above. They all gained less than 7 percent of the votes, but don't take that as a sign that they aren't useful. Instead, check them out. You might be one of those who loves them.

Here's a rundown on general features that users said they like or find important. You can find more definitions about many of these on the Search Assistance Features page:

  • Autocategorization
  • Clustering
    (showing only one or two pages per web site in top results)
  • Date limitation
  • File search
    (ability to find more than HTML files)
  • Freshness
  • Image search
  • Link analysis for ranked results
  • News search
  • Newsgroup search
  • Page translation
  • Phrase search
  • Relevancy
  • Search within feature
  • Simplicity
  • Speed
  • Spell checking

Best Specialty Search Engine

This category recognizes the best search engine providing results in a particular topical area. No actual search engines were listed on the voting form. Instead, voters were asked to "write-in" a search engine they liked and comment about why it was good.

Winner: Scirus

Of the 96 valid votes received, science search engine Scirus received the most, 9 percent. We agree that this service deserves to win. Introduced in 2001, Scirus has the laudable goal of helping people find scientific information on the web. It's not perfect, but there's no doubt it's a great resource to have, as one comment received sums up succinctly:

"Because it scans Postscript files as well as HTML and PDF - and it concentrates on a huge range of sites which really are appropriate. While it does include some farcical stuff (Arithmancy is a science?) and it is not totally rigorous in excluding non-relevant pages, it does more-or-less manage to focus on relevant and reliable sites, and the swathe of sites it does cover is enormous compared to other science-oriented engines."

Honorable Mention: Google Groups

When search engines first became popular in the mid-90s, newsgroup searching was often offered right alongside web search. Over time, newsgroup search providers disappeared, until it seemed only Deja (DejaNews) was left. Then the future of Deja's archives seemed in doubt last year, as the company encountered cash problems.

Google came to the rescue, acquiring the archives, growing them with new posts and then taking on the challenge of recovering many posts never archived that stretch back for 20 years. Newsgroup searching is a great way to discover what people are talking about or to find answers to questions in a more unstructured information collection than web pages. Google deserves recognition for bringing good newsgroup searching back to the masses.

Other Notable Results

There were many different suggestions that received one or two votes, so we wanted to list a number of them below, in case they may be of interest:

Hall Of Fame

The Hall Of Fame recognizes outstanding performance in helping Internet users locate information over an extended period of time or for having broken new ground in the search space. Inductees currently include Yahoo and FindLaw, added last year. They are joined by:

Inductee: AltaVista

AltaVista launched in December 1995 and quickly because the Google of its day (or Google is the AltaVista of its day). Indeed, things that people widely praise Google for now brought AltaVista kudos years ago. AltaVista raised the bar in coverage of the web by search engines tenfold, from the typical 2 million pages offered by its competitors to over 20 million pages. It was relevant, fast and offered a clean and simple design. It offered a range of handy power search commands. It provided its own newsgroup search. It popularized page translation linked to search results. It offered basic spell checking and automatic phrase detection. It was without a doubt one of the top search engines that people depended on for several years.

AltaVista has suffered from a variety of owners that never seemed to know what to do with it. Eventually, it was sent it down the terrible path of transformation into a portal. Today, AltaVista seeks a turnaround in its fortunes to recover past glory. Whether it will get there remains to be seen, but for its past work, AltaVista is added to the Hall Of Fame.

Inductee: The Open Directory

The way many people depend on Google today was the way many people depended on Yahoo back in 1998. The problem was, at least for webmasters, getting listed in human-powered Yahoo was unpredictable. It could take weeks or months for editors to list a site, if it happened at all. There was no paid "express" option available, and people were crying out for change.

Change came, but not that year from Yahoo. Instead, a volunteer guide called NewHoo was created in June 1998, with the vision that if enough people were involved, sites could easily be listed. By November of that year, it caught the eye of Netscape and was purchased, with the pledge that its listings would always be made open to anyone who wanted them -- hence its new name, The Open Directory.

Since then, the Open Directory has been an important resource for those seeking information on the web. For instance, anyone using the Google Directory owes a debt to the volunteers of the Open Directory, which powers Google's edition.

The Open Directory has its problems, in particular with some editors abusing their authority. However, nothing is without fault, especially in a volunteer situation. Dmoz, as the Open Directory is known to its editors and many site owners, remains the only major directory of the web that is completely free for submissions. For its significant part in shaping how the web is indexed, the Open Directory is added to the Hall Of Fame.

Coda

To the person who wrote:

"I really hope someone reads all the optional comments I have been writing, or else I would feel like I am wasting my time."

We did read them; we did appreciate them, and your time was well spent. Thanks to you and all those who participated in helping select this year's winners.

Back To Awards Home Page

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