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With billions of pages on the Internet, finding
what one is searching for sometimes feels like looking for a
needle in a hay stack. Try some of the search tools on this
page to help you find what you are looking for. Please try
more than one because they all work a little differently and may
bring back different results. Many of these sites
are incorporating both crawler/search engines and
directories to provide better search results. Some are now
Portals providing many other services such as free e-mail accounts
and personalized pages that display one's personal preferences
(stock quotes, sport scores, local weather, etc.).
Crawler/search engine sites use special
software that "crawls" the Web (often called robots, bot,
spider or crawler) looking for content. These sites work
best for more specific, narrow topics. Below is a list of
some popular Search Engines.
| AllTheWeb |
AlltheWeb's index is provided by Yahoo
and includes billions of web pages. It indexes
PDF files, News, Pictures, Videos, MP3 files, FTP and
Microsoft Word, Excel and Power Point files. It claims
its search features allow anyone to find anything faster
than with any other search engine. |
| Bing |
Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live
Search, and MSN Search) is the name of Microsoft's web
search engine, designed to compete with the industry leaders
Google. and Yahoo! On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and
Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo!
Search. |
| Cuil |
Pronounced "cool." Launched in July
2008, it claims to be the world's biggest search engine.
"Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three
times as many as Google and ten times as many as
Microsoft....Rather than rely on superficial popularity
metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their
content and relevance." According to their
website: "Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For
knowledge, ask Cuil." |
| Google |
One of the largest search engines on the
Internet, Google has become the pre-eminent Web search
engine. Among its many popular features are its
ability to search for Image files, PDF files, Usenet
Groups' posts, a powerful Directory, a News Search feature,
Froogle, and its cached
archives. |
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A directory site actually has human editors
that create its site listings. These sites are useful for
general topics. Below is a list of some popular Directory
Sites.
| About.com |
A Portal. The About network
consists of hundreds of Guide sites, created and
maintained human professional subject specialists.
neatly organized into 24 channels. The sites cover more
than 57,000 + topics with over 1 million links to the best
resources on the Net. In 2005 About, Inc. was
acquired by The New York Times Company(NYSE: NYT). |
| Librarians'
Index to the Internet |
A searchable, annotated subject directory
of more than 20,000 Internet resources selected and
evaluated by librarians for their usefulness to users of
public libraries. |
| Open Directory
Project |
Uses volunteers to create the largest
human reviewed directory on the Web. Their
slogan: "HUMANS do it better." Also
known as DMoz (from Directory.Mozilla.org, the original
domain name), it is owned by America Online. |
| WWW Virtual
Library |
A very extensive, high quality subject
catalog with an academic/research focus. |
| Yahoo |
A Portal. The oldest major
directory and one of the Internet's most popular search
sites. In addition to its web portal, Yahoo is also known
for its search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory,
Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping
(Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video), and social
media websites and services. On July 29, 2009,
Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would
power Yahoo! Search. |
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Meta-search sites query other search engines
and/or directories for their search results. Meta-searches
are useful for specific searches.
| Clusty |
The clustering search engine. It
does not crawl or index the web but rather it organizes the
outputs of other search engines into meaningful groups for
easy browsing. All this is done in seconds. Good
Advanced Search features. |
| Dogpile |
Dogpile is a meta-search engine that
searches the Internet's top search engines such as Google,
Yahoo!, Live Search, and Ask.com. When you use Dogpile, you are actually
searching many search engines simultaneously. |
| Ixquick |
When you search Ixquick, you are
searching many popular search engines at the same time.
Ixquick reports the results using its "star
rating" system, only reporting top ten results
from each search engine. |
| KartOO |
Co-founded in France by two cousins,
Laurent and Nicholas Baleydier. "KartOO is a
metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you
click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search
engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents
them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary
algorithm." |
| MetaCrawler |
MetaCrawler is a metasearch engine that
blends the top web search results from Google, Yahoo!, Live
Search (formerly MSN Search), Ask.com, About.com, MIVA,
LookSmart and other popular search engines. Owned by InfoSpace, Inc. |
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Uses natural language to search the Internet.
| Ask.com |
Formerly Ask Jeeves. Ask uses
the ExpertRank algorithm to provide relevant search results
by identifying the most authoritative sites on the Web.
"With Ask search technology, it's not just about who's
biggest: it's about who's best. " |
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