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Search Engines
Major Search Engines and Subject Directories
- AllTheWeb.com
Crawler-based search engine operated by FAST. Good coverage and relevancy. Fearures specialty searching for news, pictures, video, MP3s, and FTP files.
- Alta Vista
A favorite among researchers due to its comprehensive coverage and power seaching commands. Also has the "Ask Alta Vista" results which come from Ask Jeeves and directory listings from Open Directory and LookSmart. Good speciality searching for news, images, video, and audio.
- Ask Jeeves
Allows natural language searching of its database. A meta-search engine, it searches other leading search engines and displays the first 10 responses of each. Its database consists of more than 7 million questions.
- Excite
Large, current database and one of the more popular search services on the Web. In addition to a standard search engine for word/phrase queries. With News Search search current news of over 300 magazines and newspapers. Can also do Photo Search and Audio/Video Search.
Unlike many of the large portals, Google has a simple, uncluttered interface and has gained a reputation for its high-relevancy results. Makes heavy use of link popularity as a primary way to rank web sites and has a huge index of the web. Also includes "cached" links. Google offers searching in 15 languages. Has specialized features like UncleSam search of .gov and .mil sites, a translator, image search, file type search, and more.
- HotBot
A favorite among researchers due to its many power-searching features. Has an easy-to-use search page and a "super search" page with even more search-refining capabilities that can limit searches by date, domain, or media and the ability to search for pages containing specific technologies like JavaScript or Shockwave, or images, audio, etc. Access to 4 major crawler-based engines including AlltheWeb, Inktomi, Google, and Teoma.
- Infomine
Scholarly internet resources including electronic journals and books, online library card catalogs, and directories of researchers. Selected and annotated by University of California librarians.
- Librarian’s Index to the Internet
Searchable, annotated, subject directory of more than 6,400 Internet resources selected and evaluated by librarians. High quality site selection prevails. By using its advanced search feature and limiting the search to "databases" one can access many databases inaccessible by major search engines (Invisible Web).
- Lycos
Started at Carnegie Mellon University as a search engine, in 1999 shifted to a directory model similar to Yahoo!. Emphasizes search results from the Open Directory and offers results from the FAST index.
- MSN Search
Results from Looksmart directory and some human editors. Offers an advanced search option with form-based field searching.
- Netscape Search
Owned by AOL Time Warner and uses Google for main listings.
- Northern Light
A favorite search engine among researchers. Especially good for scholarly and arcane information. It features a large index, also has a "special collection" of more than 14 million documents not available on any other search engine that are available for purchase. UPDATE: Northern Light's parent company went bankrupt, and in June 2003, one of the former employees bought the Northern Light part of the business at auction. Expectations are that the site soon could re-emerge, but for the time-being, it no longer works.
- Raging Search
Operated by AltaVista, use this for fast search results. Similar to Google in that there are no portal features getting in the way.
- TopClick: The Internet’s Private Search Engine
Pledges no banner ads, no cookies, no personal data disclosure. Uses Google search technology.
- TEOMA
Owned by Ask Jeeves, this crawler-based search engine has a smaller index than most popular search engines, but good relevancy. Features "refine" option which gives users additional topics.
- Yahoo!
The Web's most popular search service. Has the largest human-compiled guide to the web with over 1 million sites listed. Also supplements its results with those from Google.
- Ask Jeeves
Allows natural language searching of its database. A meta-search engine, it searches other leading search engines and displays the first 10 responses of each. Its database consists of more than 7 million questions.
- DogPile
Powered by Infospace, this relatively new meta-search tool offers good results. Has a handy feature that allows one to set the order and the number of the 25 search engines so that results from one’s favorites sites return first, and/or exclude certain sites from the seach engine list.
- Fazzle
Simple and customizable interface. Searches many Web search engines including Google, Yahoo, Lycos, WiseNut, and Teoma. Also searches International search resources.
- Fetcher.Info
Searches 10 Web search engines in parallel (Overture, LookSmart, Yahoo!, AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, MSN, Google, Northern Light, Google News), merges and de-duplicates the hits, and groups related hits.
- Ixquick
Searches 14 search engines at once including Alta Vista, Fast Search, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, MSN, Yahoo and more. If the site shows up in the top ten results of many different search engines, it will rank very high in Ixquick's results.
- MetaCrawler
For a quick search of the major search engines, try here first. One of the earliest meta-search engines, searches: Alta Vista, Excite, Google, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler and Yahoo, organizes and relevance-ranks the results. Many other types of databases have been added recently including computer projects, usenet, files, and stock quotes.
- ProFusion
Good option in search engine selection, once can choose the best three, the fastest three, all or any of the available search engines. Also provides "Invisible Web" resources.
- Query Server
Searches over 10 major engines including Teoma, AltaVista, HotBot, and MSN. Also the ability to search catagories such as News, Health, Money, and Government.
- Search.com
Operated by CNETand uses technology from SavvySearch.com, an early meta-search engine.
- Webcrawler
Owned by Infospace, this ad-free meta-search engine quickly pulls resources from over 13 major search engines.
International Subject Indexes and Search Engines
- Search Engine Colossus
Links to hundred of search engines by country.
- Alta Vista International Search Network
- EuroSeek
- Excite
Global Excite is at bottom of page, contains separate search engines for various countries.
- Fazzle
Simple and customizable interface. Searches many Web search engines including Google, Yahoo, Lycos, WiseNut, and Teoma. Also searches International search resources.
- French Search Engines
- India - 123 India
- Looksmart
Search engines for Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Netherlands, U.K. and others.
- Lycos
See bottom of page for Lycos Worldwide sites.
- Russia - Russia on the Net
- Searchy.co.uk
- TeRespondo
- Yahoo!
Listing by country is near bottom of page.
- Adobe PDF Search
Adobes's own search tool offers a way to access the many high quality documents on the web currently inaccessible by most search engines.
- The Big Hub.com
Maintains a directory of over 1,500 subject specific searchable databases in over 300 categories. Each database features annotations and search forms to directly access the database. Keep in mind, though, that these searches eliminate advanced searching features often available by each database on their own site.
- CompletePlanet
Offers searchable access to thousand of databases with "hidden" information, an added bonus is its LexiBot search tool. This tool looks at your search, then selects the most relevant of 600 different invisible web resources and forwards your query to them.
- Google Advanced Search
Clicking on the Advanced Search link on Google's Home page opens a search form that allows limiting your search topic to specific domain (.edu, .org, dot.gov, etc.) and/or to documents of a specific file format (Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Rich Text, Excel). Often, documents in non-HTML formats are publically available, but do not have any "official" link on a website, such as when someone puts a PowerPoint presentation up for interested people who may want follow-up on a talk. Google regularly searches for these, but the results can get lost in a crowd of HTML documents. Other features include how to find pages that link to a page and finding pages that are similar.
- Invisible Web Catalog
A joint venture by Intelliseek, Invisible Web Catalog provides links to more than 7,000 specialty search resources. A handy feature is its Hot List. These are searchable Web sites arranged in an alphabetical index of popular categories, from air fares to yellow pages. Clicking on a category reveals a bulleted list of links to heavily used databases. When you select a given link, the Catalog not only provides a description of the database, but also its search form.
- Infomine Multiple Database Search
Focuses on scholarly resource collections, electronic journals and books, online library card catalogs, and directories of researchers. Unlike many Invisible Web search tools, Infomine allows simultaneous searching of multiple databases.
- Librarian's Index to the Internet
Access Invisible Web resources here by using LII's advanced search feature. You must limit your search to return only databases in the results list.
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March 31, 2008 -- http://www.library.cmu.edu/Research/Genref/srch-eng.html
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