Search Engines

Much of the content for the list of search engines below is taken from the article, Major Search Engines and Directories, found at http://searchenginewatch.com

Top Choices

Google
Voted four times Most Outstanding Search Engine by Search Engine Watch readers, Google has a well-deserved reputation as the top choice for those searching the web.

A9
A9.com is a powerful search engine, using web search and image search results enhanced by Google, Search Inside the BookŪ results from Amazon.com, reference results from GuruNet, movies results from IMDb, and more.

Kartoo
Kartoo is a clustering search engine tool that graphically shows relationships between classes of information.

Mooter
Kartoo is a clustering search engine tool that graphically shows relationships between classes of information.

Yahoo
Launched in 1994, Yahoo is the web's oldest "directory," a place where human editors organize web sites into categories. However, in October 2002, Yahoo made a giant shift to crawler-based listings for its main results.

Ask Jeeves
Ask Jeeves is doing innovative things with invisible tabs and with what it calls Smart Search. We think the future of search will be this much smarter approach to delivering up more than just web pages. It makes Ask Jeeves well-worth a visit by anyone looking for information.

Webbrain
Webbrain lets you search the Web visually, instead of long lists of text, Webbrain searches the Web by topic and related categories. Related Websites appear at the bottom of the page.

All the Web
Powered by Yahoo, you may find AllTheWeb a lighter, more customizable and pleasant "pure search" experience than you get at Yahoo itself. The focus is on web search, but news, picture, video, MP3 and FTP search are also offered.

AOL
AOL Search provides users with editorial listings that come from Google's index. So, why would you use AOL Search? Primarily because you are an AOL user. The "internal" version of AOL Search provides links to content only available within the AOL online service. In this way, you can search AOL and the entire web at the same time. The "external" version lacks these links.

Hotbot
HotBot provides easy access to the web's three major crawler-based search engines: Yahoo, Google and Teoma. Unlike a meta search engine, it cannot blend the results from all of these crawlers together. Nevertheless, it's a fast, easy way to get different web search "opinions" in one place.

Teoma
Teoma is a crawler-based search engine owned by Ask Jeeves. It has a smaller index of the web than its rival crawler-competitors Google and Yahoo. However, being large doesn't make much of a difference when it comes to popular queries, and Teoma's won praise for its relevancy since it appeared in 2000. Some people also like its "Refine" feature, which offers suggested topics to explore after you do a search.

Other Choices

Altavista
AltaVista opened in December 1995 and for several years was the "Google" of its day, in terms of providing relevant results and having a loyal group of users that loved the service.

Gigablast
Compared to Google, Yahoo or even Teoma, Gigablast has a tiny index of the web. However, the service is constantly gaining new and interesting features. Give it a whirl, if you want to try something experimental yet dependable.

Looksmart
LookSmart is primarily a human-compiled directory of web sites. The real gem at LookSmart can be found via its Articles tab. That provides access to content from thousands of periodicals.

Lycos
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the web, launched in 1994. It ceased crawling the web for its own listings in April 1999 and instead provides access to human-powered results from LookSmart for popular queries and crawler-based results from Yahoo for others.

MSN
Formerly one of Search Engine Watch's top choices, MSN Search is definitely one to watch.

Netscape Search
Netscape Search displays results from Google, but has a completely different look and feel.

Open Directory
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

11 January, 2005
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