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Search Engines
fill their data pools by self registration of webmasters and owners of websites, plus they are ?crawling? the web searching new addresses of public information. The major engines are indexing up to thousands of pages of a website, analyzing the data (e.g. for ?keyword density?) and decide about relevancy using patented algorithms.

For reviews and inside knowledge about search engines and search technology you should visit SearchEngineWatch - all you ever wanted to know about search technology.

MY TIP
Soople - Simplified Google. Wonder what Google has to offer but you never discovered…

The Big Three

• Google - Google was originally a Stanford University project by students Larry Page and Sergey Brin called BackRub. By 1998, the name had been changed to Google, and the project jumped off campus and became the private company Google.
• Yahoo - Launched in 1994, 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 crawler-based listings for its main results. These came from Google until February 2004. Now, Yahoo uses its own search technology.
• MSN - The most recent major search engine, owned by Microsoft. Previously relied on others for its search engine listings. In 2004 it debuted a beta version of its own results, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot). In early 2005 it started showing its own results live.

The Rising Star

• Ask - in February 2006, Ask Jeeves was rebranded as Ask.com. The butler logo was removed and several new features including search tool box, maps (with walking directions and dynamic address generation) and more “Smart Answers” were added. Ask.com is now an algorithmic engine. While you can still ask questions, it operates using a relevance ranking.

Cluster Search Engines

• Vivissimo - Enter a search term, and Vivismo will not only pull back matching responses from major search engines but also automatically organize the pages into categories. Slick and easy to use.
• Clusty - does not only search major search engines but also digs through Wikipedia articles, blogs and jobs…

Meta Search Engines

• Dogpile - Popular metasearch site owned by InfoSpace that sends a search to a customizable list of search engines, directories and specialty search sites, then displays results from each search engine individually.
• IceRocket - Searches the major search engines, blogs and myspace.
• InfoGrid - In a compact format, InfoGrid provides direct links to major search sites and topical web sites in different categories. Meta search and news searching is also offered.
• IxQuick - Meta search engine that ranks results based on the number of “top 10″ rankings a site receives from the various search engines.
• Metacrawler - One of the oldest meta search services
• MetaEureka - Search against several major search engines and paid listings services, plus news and blogs search.
• Turbo10 - Digs through the Invisible Web too. Option to add a great number of data sources to “collection”.
• Proteus Internet Search - one interface for the search in many sources plus a special character Virtual Keyboard.
• A9 - amazon´s answer on information management. Finds books, movies, people, encyclopedic entries, and many sources more…
• YurNet - offers a great package of tools and options, like a Comparison Search, and Internet Toolbox (searches WHOIS and dns lookups), a Specialty Search, News Search and Web Buzz Search through several notable social networks.
• Monster Crawler
  http://monstercrawler.com/
  Searches News, Video, MP3, Weather, Sports, Stocks, Advertising, Yellow Pages, White Pages, Maps/Directions, City guid, Chat, Entertainment, Classifieds, Business Services, Military
• MetaGer, deutschsprachige Suchmaschinen
  http://mesa.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/

Special Search Engines

• Librarians Internet Index
  LII offers a searchable and browsable collection of over “tens of thousands” of quality websites, “maintained by librarians and organized into 14 main topics and nearly 300 related topics,” in addition to an excellent weekly newsletter [they have 40,000 subscribers in many countries], available by email or RSS, of high-quality Websites related to current events, holidays, and popular and important issues. New features added with their Fall 2005 upgrade include icons following the titles allowing you to view more details, make comments about, or e-mail the site. Of course, LII can also lead you to Invisible Web databases by typing in a broad topic and adding the words: “and databases” (i.e., biology and databases).
• FindLaw
  The highest-trafficked legal Web site, FindLaw provides “the most comprehensive set of legal resources on the Internet for legal professions, businesses, students and individuals.” To find an annotated list of free databases on many law-related topics, from their main page, click on the “For Legal Professionals” tab at the top, click on the “Practice Areas” link under the “Research the Law” section, pick a practice area/legal subject heading (i.e., “Health Law”), and then look for “Databases” under the Web Guide for that legal subject heading.
• InfoMine
• BrightPlanet - contains “70,000+ searchable databases & specialty search engines.”
• Super Searchers Web Page - This page features a growing collection of links to subject-specific Web resources recommended by the world’s leading online searchers.
• TouchGraph - an unusual way to see search results

Regional Search Engines

• Search Engine Colossus -
• Country Search Engines -
• Search Engines Worldwide - many pics missing but a quite good resource anyway