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!!

More than a few movies both on and off the big screen have tried to tackle the Bermuda Triangle. The results so far have been predictably bad, until Bryan Singer of the X-Men fame and Dean Devlin of the Star Gate and Independence fame decided to do their version of it.

Last night I watched The Triangle marathon on cable. Originally produced for the Sci-Fi Network, it lasts over 225 minutes and was shown in 3 parts. It features several well known faces from TV and some from the Movies.

The premise of the series is that a eccentric billionaire (we were told he was eccentric OK?), played by Sam Neil, who has lost several ships in the Triangle puts together a team of misfits OK, not so misfits to investigate why and how his ships were lost. The incentive was an-offer-you-cant-refuse five million dollars each.

We are thus introduced to the Eric Stolz character, formerly of New York Times, but now is writing for The Observer (kinda like the Enquiere) to feed his family. Then we are introduced to Catherine Bell of JAG fame, yummm, who got fired from her job, don’t ask. Her specialty; deep seas something or the other. After, we are introduced to the Bruce Davidson character who played Senator Kelly from the X-Men movies, who plays a Psychic of dubious background and lastly to Michael Rodgers of, I dont know where this guy comes from, he speaks in an Australian accent and plays a adventurous weather scientist.

And not to forget the Lou Diamond Phillips character, who plays a Greenpeace activitist who survives the Triangle and now begins to have strange episodes.

The mini series is well researched and tries to touch all the lore surrounding it from Christopher Columbus reports to the missing flight of Avengers to the USS Cyclops.

It starts off promisingly with a series of mysteries, obligatory introduction to the five characters, their background, their issues etc.. While not the greatest of introductions it gets the job done, makes the characters more multi dimensional. But that is where they pretty much stayed until the end.

Personally I don’t think there is enough material in it to be a 225 minute presentation, it could have easily been done in 90 to 120 minutes, and it would have been a tighter and more entertaining experience. Sadly as genre fare goes, this is not a bad mini-series, in fact it is quite good - kinda like the Hallmark mini-series; but the problem I have is why do genre fans have to put up with such half-hearted attempts at mini-series. Compare this to - Battlestar Galactica from the same network and you see a big difference.

It tries to wrap up the whole Bermuda Triangle Mystery of the how and the why; while it manages to do that - quite neatly I might add, it leaves one wondering what it was all about at the end of 225 minutes with the strangely anti-climatic ending. Maybe that is one of the mysteries of The Triangle. I am fan of most of the people who are involved here - from the writers to the actors, but better to have re-watched the Battlestar Galactica or gone to see Snakes On A Plane.

Verdict : If you are a fan of genre sci-fi and have a few odd hours, do see it. But whatever you do, don’t buy the DVD.