Internet Guide - Search Engines
Search engines come in three flavors:
Search Engines, which use programs to scour the Internet and arrange what they find into a database for searching;
Directories, which are mediated by humans, who assign what they find on the Internet to a database for searching; and
Metasearch Engines, which search multiple search engines and directories at the same time and bring the results together.
All three types are variously represented here. Some of the following include a combination of two or more of these types.
Recommended:
http://www.google.com
Google is perhaps the most popular pure search engine.
IPL2
http://www.ipl.org
Public library of and for the Internet community, including an index of the Internet.
Ask
http://www.ask.com
Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) is a "real language" search engine: it accepts searches written in everyday language.
Metacrawler
http://www.metacrawler.com
Metacrawler searches and delivers results from eight different search engines at once.
Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com
Yahoo includes both a search engine and a directory. It can produce extremely accurate results.
WolframAlpha
http://www.wolframalpha.com
WolframAlpha allows you to search computational knowledge such as math, dates & time, finance, units of measurement and science.
Also:
AlltheWeb
http://www.alltheweb.com
AlltheWeb uses Yahoo's search technology, but is notable for Yahoo's beta Livesearch technology, which provides results as you type (currently only works in IE 6 or Firefox 1.5).
Altavista
http://www.altavista.com
AltaVista uses Yahoo's search technology with a different interface, but is notable for its Babelfish text transliteration engine.
Clusty
http://clusty.com
Unlike other search engines, Clusty clusters its searches into categories. If you remember the Northern Lights search engine, you'll get the idea.
Dogpile
http://www.dogpile.com
Dogpile is another "meta" search engine, much like Metacrawler.
HotBot
http://www.hotbot.com
IxQuick
http://www.ixquick.com
Kids Click
http://www.kidsclick.org
Kids Click is a web search engine for kids, maintained by librarians at the Colorado State Library.
Open Directory Project
http://www.dmoz.org
Human-edited directory of the web: volunteers edit and submit websites to the search engine.
Bing
http://www.bing.com
The successor to MSN Search, an integrated search engine with some nifty interface features.
Yahoo! Kids
http://kids.yahoo.com
It's Yahoo! for kids.
