Top Of Mind

Search is generally taken for granted today when we go on the Internet. Who still remembers the days of CompuServe and it’s BBS where you have to use the keyboard to navigate the menus? Or the days when Yahoo was “the” portal where we get access to all the info? Today, search in king - or at least that is what I heard say around the net. But do we know that there are many kinds of search? Here are “some” examples.. and they are all linked.. unless I mess up the html..

* Pay per click search engines (CPC, PPC) Basically it is a service that sells paid listings on a cost-per-click or CPC basis. Example are AdWords, Overture now part of Yahoo.

* Shopping search engines. Yup, helps you shop. You will have heard of these two BizRates and Froogle. Kelkoo which is now also part of Yahoo and MSN Shopping are the others.

* Then there are Kids Search Engines. Didn’t know they existed.. or at least I didn’t. Here are two, Yahooligans and Ask Jeeves for Kids. Both with Kid friendly layouts and colors, although Yahooligans is more like a portal of old.

* Multimedia Search Engines. Ditto Image Search, Kazaa Media Desktop for MP3 or Lycos Pictures and Sound. * Speciality Search Engins. Also called vertical search, they specialize in narrow topics like travel, medical, computers domain search. Too lazy to link, but try this.

* Country Specific Search Engines. Too numorous to list, but here is a French one.

* Metacrawlers, metasearch engines. They don’t do the search themselves, but “leech” results from other major search engines. KartOO a really cool serach that shows your searches visually and Mamma, one of the oldest meta search engines on the web.

* Special News Search like Google News, Alta Vista News, Yahoo News.. or the lesser known

* Main Search Engines.. which we will look at below..

Google changed everything, and changed the way we access info on the net. Well this is not about Google, because that has been done to death. This is all about the little guys in search engines. Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves are the main ones and most likely we use them quite regularly. Live is another, but it is still small in terms of users. Now we will ONLY look at the other smaller guys that you might or might not have heard about, but the are worth a try.

* AllTheWeb.Com - used to be known as FAST, but since Yahoo bought out FAST’s parent company Overture, it is now powered by Yahoo. Confusing, no? Anyway nice clean interface with a dash of light blue which is all the rage on the net these days.

* Search.aol.com - from none-other than AOL itself. Sporting a clean simplified interface with also a blue theme. Slight difference is that you can save your searches from the search page itself.

* HotBot provides easy access to top search engines, Google, MSN and Ask.com. Unlike Metacrawlers, it cannot combine all the searches, you have the ability to choose which engine you want to use. Of course why you cannot go directly to Google or MSN pages themselves, I have no idea.

* Ask.com - has a smaller index but sometimes large isn’t necessarily better in search engines, but relevance. Somehow this is wll known for it’s relevant search results, or so I am told because of ExpertRank algorithm uses subject-specific popularity instead of global popularity.

* Gigablast - has a smaller index also but it is specialized search which shows other terms related to your search term - or something like that.

* Looksmart combines regular search and vertical search - so if you are looking for say real estate, you supposedly get better results. Or that is what is meant to happen. Apparently it includes paid listings, so it is a hybrid search engine.

* Finally Open Directory which uses volunteer editors to catalog the web.

There are a whole bunch of the search engines like Dogpile, DayPop which is currently down and Ananova. I do not cover the obvious ones, in case you are wondering what happened to Google Image Search or Google Maps. So what is the verdict? Which is the best? Well I didn’t set out to do a comparison article or do a scientific research. I just wanted to compile a list of some other search engines that we might or might not know about.

Oh, and how did I get all these results? Which search engine did I use to find all this? Well, it’s from Google of course!!