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Search Engine Resources
- About: www.about.com
About bills itself as the "Human Internet," where human guides help you find "what you need to know." The About site holds over 50,000 subjects with over one million links to the best resources on the Web. The network consists of hundreds of "guide" sites organized into channels.
- All The Web (FAST Search): www.alltheweb.com
AllTheWeb.com (also known as FAST Search) has one of the largest indexes on the Web. FAST also offers large indexes of news, photo, video, MP3, and multimedia files. Launched in May 1999, this site is a showcase for FAST's search technologies. Its listings are shared with many portals, including Lycos.
- Alta Vista: www.altavista.com
Alta Vista, which means "a view from above," is one of the oldest crawler-based search engines on the Web. It boasts a large index of web pages, images, audio, video, and offers a wide range of power searching commands. Alta Vista also offers an extensive directory, as well as news search and shopping search capabilities. AltaVista originated in December 1995.
- AOL Search: search.aol.com
AOL Search allows its members to search across the Web and AOL's own content from this single portal site. The main listings for categories and web sites come from the Open Directory, and Inktomi provides results from spider-driven programs. Due to the 20+ million AOL member base, this site enjoys heavy traffic.
- Ask: www.ask.com
Ask is a leading provider of natural language, question answering, and search technologies for consumers and companies. Users of this search service enter a question and Ask directs them to web pages that answer the question. Ask is a human-powered search service.
- Bing: www.bing.com
Formerly the MSN search engine, Bing is currently the world's #3 search engine.
- Dogpile: www.dogpile.com
One of the most popular meta search engines, Dogpile returns comprehensive results by utilizing many of the Web's best search engines simultaneously. Dogpile uses more than a dozen of the Web's leading search engines, such as Yahoo, LookSmart, Alta Vista, and others. It also offers an expansive web directory, specialty search engines, numerous shopping links, and specialty searches for maps, auctions, MP3s, images, and more.
- Excite: www.excite.com
Excite has developed into one of the Web's busiest portal sites, offering visitors links to just about any subject imaginable. Originally launched in 1995, Excite was a spider-driven search engine until late 2001.
- Google: www.google.com
With millions of Internet users using Google, this is by far the leading search engine available today. Its system contains billions of URLs - the largest collection of web pages of any crawler-based search engine. Google is well-known for listing relevant sites due to its emphasis on ranking sites based on link analysis (in other words, sites whose popularity is evidenced by extensive cross-linking with other popular sites). Google also provides search results to many partners, and provides the ability to search for images.
- Hot Bot: www.hotbot.com
A leading robot-driven search engine, HotBot utilizes the search technologies of Inktomi and Direct Hit for its results. It offers a directory of fifteen main categories, with listings provided by Open Directory. HotBot also has links to news, discussion groups, stock quotes, white and yellow pages, and other information sources.
- Look Smart: www.looksmart.com
Started in 1996, LookSmart owns one of the world's largest human-compiled directories of web sites. A search service in its own right, LookSmart also provides directory results to many portals, such as Alta Vista, Excite, Ask, and many others. More than 80,000 businesses rely on LookSmart's Search Targeted Marketing technology to generate qualified leads. LookSmart uses spider-compiled results from Inktomi as a backup to its directory listings.
- Lycos: www.lycos.com
A leading portal site, Lycos offers visitors a wealth of services and informational links. Originally a search engine, Lycos switched to a directory service in 1999, using Open Directory and FAST Search for its listings. Lycos also runs HotBot as a separate search service. In 2000, Lycos joined forces with Terra Networks, S.A., to form Terra Lycos. Through its partnerships and network of web sites, Terra Lycos claims to be the world's largest web portal with more than 140 sites in 41 countries.
- Mamma: www.mamma.com
"The Mother of All Search Engines" is recognized as one of the top meta search engines on the Internet today. Mamma.com provides comprehensive and relevant results due to its proprietary technology that queries various search engines, formats the results into a virtual database, and organizes the results in a uniform format by relevance and source. Mamma.com has been experiencing exceptional growth since its inception in 1996 and presently services millions of unique users per month.
- Netscape Search: search.netscape.com
Netscape Search offers the user a choice of search engines by entering a term and clicking on Netscape, LookSmart, Overture, Ask, Lycos, or Google. This portal also features an extensive directory of over 3 million human-reviewed web sites, with listings from Open Directory and Netscape's own database. Netscape Search also has excellent topic search engines for such categories as news, shopping, travel, money, classifieds, reference, and entertainment.
- Open Directory: dmoz.org
The Open Directory Project is the Web's largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory. Its catalog is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The Open Directory powers the core directory services for many popular search engines and portals, including AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, Netscape Search, and numerous others. Netscape acquired Open Directory in 1998, and allows use of the directory through an open license arrangement.
- Yahoo: www.yahoo.com
Yahoo is a combination directory-based and spider-driven search engine, and is currently the world's #2 search engine.
- Search Engines.com: http://www.searchengines.com
Premier site for explaining the types of search tools, how they work, and how to optimize Web sites for best search results.
- Search Engine Watch.com: http://www.searchenginewatch.com
Great site for understanding everything you need to know about search tools. Top search engines are listed, along with a wealth of topics and tips.
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