Major Search Engines

The search engines below are all what we consider major search engines. However this industry is very dynamic so changes can occur from time to time.

Google

Google has a reputation as the most widely used search engine. The crawler-based service provides both comprehensive coverage of the web along with great relevancy. It's highly recommended as a first stop in your hunt for whatever you are looking for.

AllTheWeb.com

All The Web provides comprehensive coverage of the web and excellent relevancy for searches.

Yahoo

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 using Google's crawler-based listings for its main results. Yahoo's search results pages still show Categories links. When offered, these will take you to a list of web sites that have been reviewed and approved by a human editor. Sites pay a fee to be included in the Yahoo Directory listings

MSN Search

Microsoft has its own team of editors that monitors the most popular searches being performed and then hand-picks sites that are believed to be the most relevant. After performing a search, "Popular Topics" shown below the search box on the results page are also suggestions built largely by editors to guide you into making a more refined search. When appropriate, search results may also feature links to encyclopaedia content from Microsoft Encarta or news headlines, at the top of the page. MSN uses its own search algorithm to sift through all the listings from LookSmart to automatically find answers that are believed to be best. More about LookSmart is described below.

Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves initially gained fame in 1998 and 1999 as being the "natural language" search engine that let you search by asking questions and responded with what seemed to be the right answer to everything. In reality, technology wasn't what made Ask Jeeves perform so well. Behind the scenes, the company at one point had about 100 editors who monitored search logs. They then went out onto the web and located what seemed to be the best sites to match the most popular queries. Today, Ask Jeeves instead depends on crawler-based technology to provide results to its users. These results come from the Teoma search engine that it owns, which is described above.

HotBot

HotBot provides easy access to the web's four major crawler-based search engines: AllTheWeb.com/FAST, Google, Inktomi and Teoma, all of which are described elsewhere on this page. 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. The "4-in-1" option at HotBot was introduced in December 2002. However, HotBot has a long history as a search brand before this date.

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 uses crawler-based results provided by AllTheWeb (see above). So why bother with Lycos rather than using the AllTheWeb.com site? You might like some of the features that Lycos provides. "Fast Forward" lets you see search results in one side of your screen and the actual pages listed in another. Relevant categories of human-compiled information from the Open Directory appear at the bottom of the search results page. At the top of the page, Lycos will suggest other searches related to your original topic right under the search box. Perhaps you might even like the look and feel better! Whatever the reason, under the hood, Lycos provides all the same relevancy and comprehensiveness you'll find at AllTheWeb.com.

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, AllTheWeb.com, Inktomi and AltaVista. 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.

Open Directory

The Open Directory uses volunteer editors to catalogue the web. Formerly known as NewHoo, it was launched in June 1998. It was acquired by AOL Time Warner-owned Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement. While you can search at the Open Directory site itself, this is not recommended. The site has no "backup" results that kick in should there not be a match in the human-compiled database. In addition, the ranking of sites during keyword searching is poor, while alphabetical ordering is used when you choose to "browse" categories by topic.

Instead, to scan the valuable information compiled by the Open Directory, consider using the version offered by Google, the Google Directory. Here, keyword searching uses Google's refined relevancy algorithms and makes use of link analysis to better propel good pages from the human database to the top. In addition, when viewing sites by category, they will be listed in PageRank order, which means the most popular sites based on analyzing links from across the web will be listed first.

Overture

Formerly called GoTo until late 2001, Overture is an extremely popular paid placement search engine that provides ads to many of the search engines listed above. While Overture has traditionally been a paid listings provider, the company is expanding into offering crawler-based editorial results. To do this, it purchased AllTheWeb (see above) in March 2003 and expects to complete its acquisition of AltaVista (see below) by the end of April 2003.

AltaVista

AltaVista is the oldest crawler-based search engine on the web. It 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. Today, AltaVista is once again focused on search. Improvements have been made, but crawlers such as Google and AllTheWeb provide more comprehensive results. Because of this, AltaVista is probably a third-choice crawler, one to try if you haven't found what you are looking for at one of its competitors.

Source – some information was sourced from searchenginewatch.com

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