All the rage? (raging.com)

Member Name: GroundZero

Product:	raging.com
Date:	13/04/01 (42 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Simple interface, loads very quickly

Disadvantages: Not as fast as Google, results not as good

For years, Altavista was THE definitive web search engine. In the past year or so, Google have won acclaim for their stripped down search page which offers considerably faster loading times than most of their competitors, since there is no reliance on banner ads.

Raging.com was launched recently to win back web users who had been switching their loyalties to Google. Using the same familiar search engine (and database) as the old Altavista search page, Raging.com uses a much simpler layout. As the popularity of the web increased, Altavista decided that they should try to mirror Yahoo’s web portal concept, rather than concentrating on the basic search engine technology. While this was commendable, it means that Altavista’s pages contain a great deal more text and graphics, and thus they take longer to load.

Raging.com does away with all the unnecessary clutter, presenting you with a very simple interface. The main page contains only one graphic, the Raging.com logo, which means it loads almost instantaneously. Until broadband connections are commonplace, this is the kind of page I like to use.

Behind this simple interface lies a great deal of potential for customising searches to meet your requirements. The first page of options allows you to select which pieces of information you want displayed for pages that meet your requirements. You can tailor this to display such information as the size of the page, when it was last modified (handy if you want to see how recent the information it contains is) and a long list of others.

The page layout tab allows you to choose the number of results displayed per page, and whether you wish to have related searches listed or not. If you particularly want, you can change the colours and standard font used on the results pages, although I really can’t see why you would want to change the defaults. I can’t criticise the wide range of different colour schemes on offe
r though.

You are offered the option to narrow your choice of search by specifying which languages the documents can appear in, and can use Altavista’s Babelfish translation service for foreign language documents if you require.

The Advanced Search options allow you to choose whether you want to have the advanced options displayed when you perform a search. A nice touch is that you can specify that the results should be opened in a new browser window. All of these settings are saved on your computer as a cookie, so the next time you visit the Raging.com website, your previously chosen layout should be retained.

For a long time Altavista was my favourite search engine, as it seemed to offer the best coverage of web pages. In the past year I have been using Google much more often, as its speed and simplicity are very appealing. Raging.com is trying very hard to do what Google does, but I have found that it is slightly slower in general than its competitor, and doesn’t do such a good job in ranking relevant documents. The number of results returned doesn’t seem to be as high as with Google either.

For the moment I would advise that you should choose Google as your main search engine. Raging.com is a good service, but it doesn’t quite provide a good enough search facility to match Google.

Summary: